HISTORY PRIMERS
Edited by John Richard Green
GEOGRAPHY
SIR GEORGE GROVE F.R.G.S.
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Distort) primers. Edited by J. R. Green.
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GEOGRAPHY
SIR GEORGE GROVE, F.R.G.S.
WITH MAPS AND DIAGRAMS.
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1889.
[The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.1]
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CONTENTS.
Maps and Map-making :— What is a map? 6; can you read
it ? 9 ; latitude and longitude 13 ; projection 19 ; globular pro-
jection 21 ; Mercator's chart 23 ; reading a map 27 ; the
Tropics 31 ; the Zones 32 ; mariner's compass 33 ; Time 36 ;
angle of ninety degrees 39.
The Earth : — Figure of the earth 41 ; arrangement of land and
water 44 ; structure of Old World 46 ; of New World 50 ; com-
parison of the two 55 ; superiority of Europe 59 ; Australia 60 ;
North America 61.
The Ocean : — Its extent 62 ; the Atlantic 63 ; the Pacific 65 ; the
Indian 66 ; the Arctic and Antarctic 67 ; winds 68 ; currents 69 ;
Gulf Stream 71 ; the tides 73 ; bottom of ocean 74 ; its heat 78 ;
its saltness 79.
Features of the Earth :— Continents 80 ; islands 8r ; capes
83 ; mountains 84 ; their names 91 ; volcanoes 93 ; valleys 95 ;
plains 95 ; peninsulas 98 ; rivers 99 ; deltas 103 ; names of
rivers 107; lakes 109; inland seas n 1 ; waterpartings 112;
watershed 114; basin 115; coast 116; gulf 117; strait 117;
icebergs 119.
Appendix :— Measures of length 124; knots in a degree of longi-
tude in various latitudes i£5 ; scales and symbols of Ordnance
maps 126.
First Edition, January, 1877.
Reprinted, Oct. 1877; 1879, 1884, 1886, 1889.
HISTORY PRIMERS.
GEOGRAPHY.
i. Geography is from two Greek words, yn, ge, the
earth, and ypafyt), graphe, description ; and that is what
k is, a description of the earth ; not of what is below
the surface, for that is geology, but of all that is to
be seen on the face of it — the land, the sea, the
mountains, and valleys, and rivers, and lakes, and
all the rest that meets the eye. Nor of these only in
themselves, but an account of them as they are con-
cerned with the inhabitants of the world. It is some-
times said that there are three kinds of geography —
mathematical, physical, and political — of which the
first has to do with the shape and size of the world, and
the making of maps ; the second with the form of the
ground and its influence on man ; the third with the
divisions and history of nations and peoples. But all
three are embraced in the word Geography, and
therefore a Primer of Geography must have to
do with them all. Nor do I see how they can well
be separated ; for neither the form of the globe,
nor the arrangement of the land and water, nor the
divisions which nations have made between themselves,
are of any moment except as they concern us ; and
the three are so connected and mixed up together that
GEOGRAPHY.
no right view can be taken of one without the others
in some way interposing.
2. This is a little book, and therefore all our de-
scriptions must be short. Long accounts of the
countries with full particulars about them must be
left for another time. I shall not give you any par-
ticulars of the history of Geography. What the ancients
knew of it you will find in the Primer of Ancient Geo-
graphy. Nor shall we do more than glance at the pro-
cesses by which the earth became what it is, how the
mountains were lifted up and the valleys scooped out ;
for that is done to perfection in the Primer of Physical
Geography. And we shall touch as little as possible
on Astronomy, because you will find that in the
Primer and Elementary Lessons on that science. But
I shall try to give you a general knowledge of what
the world is and what its different parts are like,
and so prepare you for a longer and fuller account
elsewhere. I shall shew you : —
I. What Maps are, why they are wanted, and how
they are made.
II. What are the general structure and arrangement
of the Earth and Ocean.
III. Some particulars of the features of Land and
Water.
3. And first about
MAPS AND MAP-MAKING.
When you sit down to a game of chess or draughts,
you have the board under your eyes, and can see and
touch every part of it. But suppose the board were
ten miles square, and you had still to play the game,
what would you do ? You would have a small repre-
sentation or map of it made, the size of a sheet of
WHAT IS A MAP?
paper, which you could keep before you and mark
all the moves upon.
4- Suppose again you had been the commanding
officer at some great battle, and wished to explain the
movements of the troops to a friend, to shew how this
farmhouse was taken, that clump of trees occupied,
and that road defended, in short how the battle went
from beginning to end; what would you do? You
would draw it all out small on a piece of paper, in the
same proportions, and with the places and things in
their positions with regard to each other, just as it
would look if you were hanging over it in a balloon ; in
other words, you would make a map of it, and then
you could easily shew your friend where the regiments
stood, and how the batteries were placed, and in
short could go through all the successive operations
of the day, and make them plain to him, plainer than
they were in the battle itself, where only one part could
be seen at a time.
5. Suppose once more that you had to walk from
London to Brighton, and did not know the way, and
had no one to shew it you. You would be utterly
puzzled. You would not know whether you were
walking towards Brighton or Reading or Chatham.
You could not see the town in the distance, and
every hedge or house or ridge would shut out the
view before you, and quite bewilder you. But if
I brought you a map with everything marked upon
it, you could then draw a straight line to Brighton,
you could see where the line cut the places on the
map, and so by degrees find your way along, field
by field, and village by village, keeping this place
to the right and that to the left, till you arrived at
your journey's end.
GEOGRAPHY.
6. Now here are three cases in which without a
map you could not get on at all. No dcubt they are
never likely to happen. But they are good examples
of what does happen every day. If all men were
fixed for life in the places they were born in, and
never travelled, and had no concern with people
of other places and countries, maps would be of
little use. But we do travel, we have business all
over the world, friends in India, friends in America ;
ships sail about the ocean where for days and weeks
they see no land, and have no apparent means of
finding their way; armies go into an enemy's country,
where it is important not only to find their way but to
know the distance exactly, to an hour's march or less ;
and for all these things maps are indispensable, and so
the science of Geography has grown up, and the method
of making maps, and of understanding them
when made — of representing on paper the surface of
the earth, with what may be called its features, all the
indentations of the coast, the bends of the rivers, the
extent of the forests, the lie of the mountains, as well
as all the cities, villages, roads, railways, canals, and so
on, in the same positions and proportions as they are
in reality, only far smaller, just as they would appear
if you could look at the world from a distance.
7. Not a picture, that is a different thing — different
in nature and different in object. A map i6 not made
to please, so much as to instruct. It aims to show
the shapes and positions of the features of the earth,
not as they rise before the eye in all the beauties of the
sun and air, and in their vertical, upright forms, but as
they are stretched out horizontally at one's feet. Sup-
pose you saw an ant running about the table-cloth at
dessert among the dishes and decanters. It sees the
CAN YOU READ A MAP?
things on each side of it, but it can have no know-
ledge of their shapes, and the way they are arranged ;
it is too small for the purpose. If it could raise
itself to the same height above the table that your
eye is, and have the same power of sight, it would
see the whole at a glance, and be able to make its
journeys without loss of time or trouble. Now the
table-cloth is the country, the ant is you, and the
view is a map.
8. But are you sure that when you have got the map
you will be able to read it ? There was a time when
you could not read a printed book, before you knew
the letters, and how to put them into words, and words
into sentences. Oh but, you say, a map is a different
thing. I can understand it at a glance. Can you ? Shew
a savage, even an intelligent savage, a photograph or
portrait, and you would think it impossible that he
should not know that it represents a man or a woman.
But the savage will not have the least idea what it
means ; he will not even know whether it is upside
down or not ; he will see no more in it than he
would on a blank bit of paper ; the picture which to
you is so plain to him says nothing, and I am very
much mistaken if the map says very much more to you.
At any rate it will not say all that it has to say. For
instance, what are the lines drawn up and down across
it, and the figures at the ends of those lines. Can you
point out to me the watershed or basins of the rivers ?
Do you even know the meaning of the words ? Can
you distinguish roads from rivers, or either of them
from canals ? or could you trace with your finger a
line over the country which should keep the same level
everywhere ? Could you shew me the shortest road
across the ocean between two places, say between
GEOGRAPHY.
Cape Horn and Canton ? Probably not ; but until you
can do this, and a great deal more, you can only read
the map imperfectly.
9. It is with the ground-plan of the earth's surface
that geography has to do, and to profit by it we must
know how maps are made. Now we know from our
Printer of Astronomy that the earth is a very large
ball about 8,000 miles through, the outside of which
is formed of the land and water that make up
the various countries. They form the skin of the
earth as the peel forms the skin of an orange ; and
just as you can take an orange, and mark a line right
round it, and come back to the same point again, so
you may set out from London, or any other place,
and go always in one straight direction, and at last,
after many months, come round to London again,
which you could not do if the earth were anything
else but a great ball.
10. Now as the earth is a ball it seems plain that the
map of the earth should be a ball too. And so it may
be ; we have them, and we call them globes, and
for getting a general idea of the world and the countries
upon it nothing can be better than a globe. But there
is one drawback, that if it were made sufficiently large
to shew the details of the map, it would be quite un-
manageable, too cumbrous for use, and also too expen-
sive. The largest globes that we see in libraries and
museums are yet so small that nothing can be given
upon them but the general features of the countries —
few details of rivers or roads or mountains or towns, or
other important things ; with the palm of your hand
you may cover the whole of England ; a great city is
no bigger than a pin's head, and your house and
garden are invisible. An attempt was once made to
NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, AND WEST. II
make a really large globe, which was shewn in
Leicester Square, London, under the name of Wyld's
Great Globe, — but though its advantages were great
its disadvantages were greater, and it was soon given
up.
ii. Our maps then must be flat. But to get a flat
representation of any large portion of a curved surface
is simply impossible. Take a piece of paper and
attempt to fit it to the surface of a ball or globe, and
it cannot be done, there will be always a number of
creases in the paper; and though the larger the globe
and the smaller the piece of paper the smaller the
creases will be, yet some will always remain at the
edges to shew that the plane surface cannot answer
exactly to the curved one. A fiat map therefore
can never be absolutely correct; it will at the
best only come near the truth.
12. To see how the difficulty is got over, we will
begin by considering a spherical map, or what is
generally called a terrestrial globe, since it is the
foundation of all map-making. And before we go
any farther we must fix on a few words, so that
we may understand exactly what we mean, and have
no confusion. In Geography we do not say Top and
Bottom, Right and Left ; but we call them north,
south, east, and west. When you are in front of
a globe or map, the top is the north, the bottom is
the south, the right hand is the east, the left hand
is the west. Also, as the earth is a ball spinning
round from West to East, as if on a pole or axle-tree
nin through it, it has been agreed to call the extreme
north spot of the earth the North Pole, and the
opposite one the South Pole. If we lived in
Australia, we should then look to the South Pole in
GEOGRAPHY.
the same way that in this country we look to the
North; the left hand would be the East, and the
right hand the West. Again, in this Primer when we
say the Earth, we mean the actual world itself ; but
when we say the Globe, we mean the representation
of it of which the following is a picture : —
Fig. i.
13. There is the globe then, or rather one side of it,
one half, a Hemi-sphere ; and two questions at once
occur to us — What are all those lines drawn up and
down and across it ? and How were all the countries
and places got into their proper places just as they are
on the earth itself? Two better questions it would be
impossible to ask, or two that depend more strictly on
each other. The lines are there solely for the
purpose of fixing the places, and the places
could not be fixed without the lines. The lines
MERIDIANS AND PARALLELS. 13
which run from top to bottom — North Pole to South
Pole — are lines or meridians of longitude ; you
see that there are 36 of them, 18 in each hemi-
sphere, and they divide the whole circumference
of the globe into 36 equal parts, each of which
again is subdivided into 10 degrees, or 360 degrees
in all. The lines which run round the globe
from west to east, at right angles to the meridians
of longitude, are called parallels of latitude, and
of these you see there are 17. The middle one,
which goes round the world at its largest part, is called
the Equator, and there are 8 to the north and 8 to
the south of it, dividing the space between the
Equator and each Pole into 9 parts ; and these
also are each of 10 degrees. They are numbered
from 1 to 90 upwards and from 1 to 90 downwards,
and those above the Equator are called parallels
of north latitude, those below it, parallels of south
latitude.
14. The meridians of longitude are all the same
size. Each one goes through both North Pole and
South Pole, and therefore runs right round the
globe ; and each is called a Great Circle because
it is the largest circle that can be drawn on the
globe. Thus there is no one meridian larger than the
rest to form a natural starting-place, as the Equator
does for the parallels, and therefore a special one
has to be chosen to count from — ten, twenty, thirty,
to the right, and ten, twenty, thirty, to the left, till they
meet at 180. The English choose that which runs
through Greenwich Observatory, and call those east of
it in East longitude, those west of it in West longitude.
The French take a line passing through Paris ; others
have taken Ferro, one of the Canary islands. It its
14 GEOGRAPHY.
quite immaterial which is chosen, as long as we know
it ; since all the lines are alike, and all that is wanted
is one to start from. But in the case of the latitude
all agree to take the Equator as the starting-point, as
being the largest of all the parallels, and standing
naturally in the middle between those north and those
south of it. For if you think a little, and if you look
at the picture,
you will see that the circles round the globe, which
we call parallels of latitude, must inevitably get less
in length as they are farther off from the Equator,
until at last they come to nothing at the Poles. There
is only one Great Circle among the whole 17 parallels,
and that one is the Equator.
15. Now the Equator is divided into 360 degrees
(written ° ), and the meridians into 360 degrees also;
KNOTS, DEGREES, MINUTES. 15
and each degree into 60 minutes (written ' ), and
each minute into 60 seconds (written " ), which
have nothing to do with the minutes and seconds of
an hour, though they are called by the same names
and divided by sixties. And thus 320 19' 27" means
32 degrees, 19 minutes, 27 seconds. Further, each
minute, each sixtieth part of a degree of the equator
or the meridians, is a mile — not a common English
mile, but a geographical or nautical mile, or knot.
Reckonings in navigation are usually made by geogra-
phical miles, and to avoid confusion we will always
call them knots. They are longer than our common
English statute miles as 2,028 is longer than 1,760, or
as 69 to 60 nearly ; and at the end of the book you
will find a table of comparison between the two.
16. Now we will go a step farther. Each meridian
is divided into 360 degrees, and each degree into
60 minutes, or 21,600 in all, and each of those minutes
is a knot, for all the meridians are Great Circles of
the same length ; and the Equator also is divided
into 360 degrees and 21,600 minutes, and each minute
is a knot there too, because the Equator is a Great
Circle also. But remember it is the only Great Circle
among all the parallels. From the nature of the case
each parallel is smaller than the last, and therefore
the value of the degrees and minutes into which they
are divided — that is to say, the degrees and minutes
of longitude which are counted along them — gets
smaller too, till, at the Pole, it comes to nothing. At
Greenwich (N. lat. 5 1° 28' 40"), the value of a degree of
longitude is only about 37 knots instead of 60. You
must please to think over this, as between the degrees
and parallels and meridians it is a little puzzling. As
long as you measure by degrees, minutes, and seconds,
GEOGRAPHY.
there is no difficulty. Two meridians that were 10
degrees apart at the Equator are 10 degrees apart at
any spot between the Equator and the Pole, the pro-
portion is always exactly the same. Some watches
have a hole in the' case with a set of figures round
it, and though the hole is only half the size of the
inside face, yet the time is always the same on
both. When it is 20 minutes to 5 on the large set
of figures it is 20 minutes to 5 on the small one,
though so much smaller ; and just so the distance
between the meridians on the globe decreases in exact
proportion, and degrees are always of the same
relative value, which is a great convenience for
measuring off. But when you begin to translate the
degrees into knots you find that the minutes of longi-
tude are continually growing smaller as they approach
the Poles, or, in other words, that each degree of
longitude contains fewer knots. At the end of the
book you will find a table for this also.
17. By the help of this apparatus of cross lines the
position of any place can be fixed on the globe and
described with the greatest accuracy. Thus Genoa is
44° 25' N. lat. ; that is, 44 degrees and 2 5-6oths of a
degree, or 25 minutes, in North latitude, or north
of the Equator ; and it is also 8° 58' E. long., that is,
8 degrees 58 minutes East longitude, or east of
the meridian of Greenwich. San Francisco again
is 37° 49' North latitude, and 1220 8' West longitude
— west of Greenwich, and so on.
18. And then the convenience of it. You hear of a
wreck taking place and the people suffering dreadful
misery on some small island, as the crew and
passengers of the Strathmore did on the Crozet islands
in 1875. The papers are full of it, and of course you
HOW THE MAP IS MADE.
want to see where it was. You might search the map
of the world all over and the name would escape you.
But if I tell you that it is in S. lat. 460 16', and E. long.
480 27', you can drop upon it in a moment.
19. But there is another service which these cross
lines can perform. Put a man suddenly down at any
spot on the earth, furnished with the proper instruments
and able to use them, and he will be able to tell you
the latitude and longitude of that spot. He will
make certain observations of the sun, moon, and stars,
and will look at his chronometer or clock, which keeps
the same time as at Greenwich, and he will tell you
how many degrees and parts of a degree he is north
or south of the Equator, and how many degrees and
parts of a degree he is east or west of the meridian of
Greenwich ; having got which knowledge the cross
lines enable him to fix the spot on the map with accu-
racy. In the same way, ships can find out where they
are on the ocean when out of sight of land; they
take observations which give them their position east
or west of the meridian of Greenwich, and north or
south of the Equator. The captain measures off these
two dimensions on his map, and then he can see
whether he is sailing in his right course or not, and
can act accordingly. What these " observations " are,
and how taken, you will find explained in the Primer
of Astronomy, at pages 108-114.
20. Thus what I said before about the globe (§13)
is quite true. The lines are there for the purpose of
fixing the places, and the places could not be fixed
without the lines.
21. We are now able to get a rough general idea of
the way in which a globe or spherical map of the
earth might be made, supposing you were going to
16 GEOGRAPHY.
make the first one that ever was. Having got your
globe, and having marked the North and South Poles
on it, and drawn the Equator midway between them,
and the parallels of latitude and meridians of longi-
tude, and numbered them, you would be in a position
to begin to put down the information brought by navi-
gators and travellers, as it arrived. For instance, some
one who had been sailing to South America might
report that he had seen four cities on the coast : —
Pernarabuco. . S. Lat 8° 3' W. Long. 340 54'
Bahia „ 120 42' „ 38° 42'
Rio Janeiro . . „ 220 53' ,, 43° 12'
Buenos Ayres ,, 340 30^ „ 5 8° 24'
These four places you could at once put down on
your globe, and they would form a beginning for
South America. The same sailor, or some one else,
would give you the line of the coast between these
places, with the latitudes and longitudes of the principal
points ; and those too you would put down. Next
week another navigator might arrive from Australia, or
a traveller, like Lieutenant Cameron, from the centre
of Africa, bringing a few points from each j and so by
degrees your map would grow until the whole globe
became covered.
22. And this is really how th» globe has been made,
only it has taken hundreds of years and thousands
of people to do it. And it is not yet complete. Of
the inside of Persia and of Australia much is yet to
be known. Numbers of latitudes and longitudes of
New Guinea were brought home by Captain Moresby
in 1873. Tibet and the other great pastoral countries
north of India are very little explored ; and you know
how many travellers, from Landor to Livingstone, have
died in the endeavour to get latitudes and longitudes
PROJECTION. 19
in the heart of Africa, and hew much has been added to
the map by the Polar expeditions, from Cook, Ross,
and Parry, to Payer and Nares. And there would be
much to correct from time to time. It is not 20
years since the coast of Syria was found to be four
miles out in all the maps, and the position of Jeru-
salem was correctly fixed for the first time.
23. So far for the globe. But we have seen that for
ordinary use globes will not do, we must have flat
maps ; and the next question is, how are these to be
made from the globe ? That is to say, how are the
cross lines to be put down ? For I cannot too often
remind you that the cross lines are the absolute foun-
dation of every map. Therefore, in making a flat map
from the globe, the parallels of latitude and meri-
dians of longitude are the first things to think of.
If we can get them accurately drawn all the rest
will follow ; get the skeleton right and we can easily
clothe it with flesh, form, and colour. Now the
skeleton will never be quite accurate, for we have
already seen that a sheet of paper can never be fitted
to the surface of a sphere. Many methods have been
tried of overcoming this, and though they are only
a choice of evils, yet practically they answer well.
For in all science an error is only an evil as long
as its exact amount is not known. When it is
known it can be allowed for and overcome. And if
we know how far off our parallels and meridians in the
flat map are from being like those on the globe, we
shall be able to allow for the mistake.
24. First therefore we have to transfer our meridians
and parallels from the sphere to the flat paper. Now
this transference is called projection — a pretty word :
it is as if the sphere were hollow, made of thin glass,
GEOGRAPHY.
and we were seated inside it looking through, and as
it were projecting the lines upon it on to the paper
beyond. And indeed, speaking roughly, that is the
principle on which most projections are made — the
globe is supposed to be made of glass and you are
stationed inside it either at the centre, or on the
side, or outside it altogether, close by, or at an
immense distance off, and you are supposed to look
through the glass and to see the meridians and
parallels projected on to a paper beyond, or on a paper
stretched between you and the globe.
25. Now we have not time to explain all the
various ways in which people have endeavoured to
represent the surface of the globe on a flat paper : it
would be very difficult to describe them so that they
would be understood, and if understood, it might
hardly be worth the trouble. We will therefore con-
fine ourselves to the two most commonly employed.
26. The world in hemispheres, which is found at
the beginning of most atlases, is drawn on what is
called the globular projection, which was the dis-
Fig- 3-
THE GLOBULAR PROJECTION.
covery of Philippe de la Hire (1640-17 1 8). In this
you are supposed to be standing outside the globe, at
a certain moderate * distance from it, and to be look-
ing through at the inside of the opposite half; and
the paper, or " plane of projection " as it is called, is
supposed to be stretched across the half at which you
are looking, like the parchment across a kettledrum.
27. Here abc is half of such a hollow glass globe,
with its meridians and parallels drawn upon it. g'v*
the place of your eye, and a dee is the opening of the
half *globe, or the plane of projection. I have drawn
the parallels on the plane of projection as they would
appear to your eye at g, when looking at them on
the inside of the globe ; the meridians are not put in,
as they would crowd the figure too much. But when
both parallels and meridians are fully drawn on the
plane of projection, or the parchment as we called it,
they have this appearance : —
Fig. 4-
28. The meridians are all the same distance apart,
* Accurately stated, the distance of the point of bight from the sphere
= (radius of Great Circle) X sin. 450.
GEOGRAPHY.
and so are the parallels when measured along the
central meridian ; but as they get nearer the outside of
the map you observe that the parallels become wider
apart, and therefore the map is distorted at the edges,
and the countries have not quite the same shape as
they have on the globe. Still you get on the whole a
fair idea of the general relation and proportions of all
the countries in one half of the surface of the earth.
For this reason, and because the globular projection is
easy to make, it has been gradually adopted for the
general map of the world in atlases.
29. In these maps the meridians and parallels are
curved lines, and therefore the shortest line between
any two points on the globe must be a curve on the
map. In maps of the land and for use by landsmen
this is of no great importance, because the distances
between the various places are not very great ; but in
charts which are used by seamen for working their
course at sea it becomes a great practical inconvenience.
A captain who has to navigate his ship say from Bristol
to Charleston is naturally anxious to sail in the right
direction between the two points. But on the maps
we have hitherto described a straight line is not the
direct line. To be a direct line it must be a curve —
if you can understand that — because both meridians
and parallels are curved. The direct line between two
places on the same parallel or the same meridian
would be easy to follow, as it would be merely the
curve of the parallel or the meridian. But suppose
the two places to be many degrees apart both in
latitude and longitude, like Ceylon and the Cape
of Good Hope, you would find that the line to be
pursued was a very complicated curve, which few
sailors could be expected to lay down correctly.
MERCATOR.
23
30. This difficulty became a. very serious one when
America was discovered and long voyages began to be
taken, and to meet it a projection was invented by
a Flemish mathematician called Mercator, in 1556,
and perfected by Edward Wright, an Englishman, in
1594, which is not only very clever, but has perfectly
answered its purpose. In this method you may sup-
pose the sphere to be enclosed in an upright cylinder
or hollow roll of paper, with the point of sight in the
centre of the sphere.
31. Here enrs is the glass
globe, with its North and South
Poles, Equator, and parallels.
The meridians are not drawn
because they would only con-
fuse us. abed is the roll of
paper wrapped round the globe.
Now if you suppose a small
bright light to be placed at the
centre, it will shine through
the globe and will throw the
shadows of the parallels on
to the roll of paper, as you
see them in the diagram — 10
will be close by, 20 will be a
little farther off, and 30 farther
off still. After that the shadows
begin to spread very much, as
you see ; and if you compare
the distance between 50 and
60, or 60 and 70, on the
globe and on the paper, you
will see how much they have widened out. The dis
24
GEOGRAPHY.
tance between 70 and 80 would be much more
than that between 60 and 70, and the shadow of
90 (that is, the Pole) would of course go up through
the end of the roll, and never be caught at all.
I have shewn you only the upper hemisphere, but
the lower one would be exactly like it, reversed.
As for the meridians, they need no diagram, for if
you think about it you will see that their shadows must
be equi-distant straight lines, running straight up and
down the roll.
32. When the roll is unwrapt, supposing the
shadows to remain fixed on the paper, it will have
this appearence : —
Fig. 6.
MERC A TOR'S PROJECTION. 25
33. Accordingly in a Mercator's map the size of the
countries at the north and south is out of proportion
to those near the Equator. For instance, Iceland
looks nearly as large as Borneo, and Greenland as
South America, though Iceland is only 200 miles from
north to south, and Borneo nearly 700, while Green-
land is 1,400 miles and South America about 4,000.
They keep their shape, but are very much too big, and
therefore you must be on your guard in a Mercator's
map not to be deceived by the apparent size of countries
near the Poles. But still for the sailor's purposes
Mercator's map is very convenient. North and south
are always straight up and down, and east and west
straight across. All the meridians are parallel, and
all the parallels are parallel too. The most ignorant
sailor can lay down his course without calculation.
In fact the invention of this map has been justly
called one of the most remarkable and useful events
of the sixteenth century. And why? because it en-
ables common unlearned people to do easily and
correctly what only clever learned people could have
done without it.
34. Hitherto we have spoken only of general maps,
in which the whole world is got on to one or two
sheets, and where a great distance like 100 miles is
represented by half an inch or an inch. But maps
are wanted for marching armies, selling properties,
laying out railways, &c, and for these great detail
is required ; not only the general form of the coast, or
the principal towns and roads, but every cottage and
hedge, and lane and clump, must be exactly in its
place. Now for doing this a different method is
employed from that which we have yet spoken of.
The latitudes and longitudes of the principal points
GEOGRAPHY.
are found, and then the smaller ones are filled-in by
the surveyors by a method called triangulation,
because it is done by triangles, which I need not de-
scribe to you. It is also called a trigonometrical
survey because the triangles are calculated by a
branch of mathematics called trigonometry.
35. Here is a bit of what is called the Ordnance
Survey of England, made in this way, on an inch
scale, that is a scale of one inch to a mile, where
each inch on the map represents a mile on the ground,
half inch, half a mile, and so on.
Fig. 7.
36. The scale is, you see, the proportion between
the size of the map and the size of the piece of
ground which it represents; a small scale means
that the map is small in proportion to the ground,
and a large scale that it is larger in proportion.
ORDNANCE MAPS. SCALE. 27
Therefore, in speaking of it, it is as well to name
the proportion itself — the number of times which
the one will go into the other. The inch scale
is thus called -^^ because there are 63360 inches in
one statute mile, and a mile on the map is one sixty-
three-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixtieth part of a
mile on the ground Ordnance maps are made to
other scales, even as large as 10 feet 6 inches to a
mile, or ^th part of the original ground. At the end
of the book you will find a table of the scales in use.
37. Maps of the world or of large countries do not
have scales marked on them, for, as I explained, they
would be incorrect, except near the centre of the
map. In the hemispheres (§28) you remember the
parallels widen out towards the outside of the map, and
appear to be farther apart than at their centre, though
they are really parallel. And in Mercatofs map (§32)
the meridians are parallel instead of sloping together j
and the parallels, though drawn parallel, do really be-
come vastly wider apart as they near the Poles.
38. In a map for use in business or common life
there must be no such uncertainties. On the inch
map an inch must be a mile exactly, whether at the
outside of the sheet, or in the middle, and measuring
either north and south, or east and west. But you
will remember that in each of the projections the
centre of the map was accurate, and that it was only
at the outsides, at long distances from the centre,
that it was distorted. And as a projection may be
made with any spot in the world as its centre, and the
maps we are speaking of do not cover more than
a few miles each way, there is no practical difficulty
in obtaining all the accuracy that is wanted.
2S
GEOGRAPHY.
39. I asked you before if you could read a map.
Like reading a book, it is only to be done by practice,
but I can perhaps give you some useful hints.
(1) Before you begin get the scale well into
your mind. A map is not a mere picture, and your
object in looking at it is to get information ; therefore,
first of all, look carefully to see how much the scale
is, how many miles there are to an inch, or you will
have no true sense of distance.
(2) Next look at the character of the ground
and the height of the hills. The slopes of the
roads, the fall of the streams, the nature of the lakes
and ponds, all depend on these things ; therefore learn
to interpret them with certainty. Now the rise and
fall of ground is shewn in two ways — either by dark or
light shading, according to the slope, or by contours.
Contours are lines which
over the ground. Here
mark the same level all
s a map of a hill with
contours, each 50 feet above or below the other. Each
line is strictly level round the hill, and is as if a flood
CONTOURS.
20
had risen by steps of 50 feet at a time, and had left
its mark at each successive step. Where the contours
spread out the ground is flatter, and where they
crowd together the ground is steep, and knowing that
they are 50 feet below one another, you can easily
tell the height of any part above or below another
part, and therefore the slope of the hill. The
other method is by what are termed hachures.
In this method, the thicker the lines, and the
Fig. 9.
closer they are together, the steeper is the ground;
and the waterpartings and crests of the slopes should
be traceable by the junction of the lines representing
the two slopes. Each method has its *advantages ;
the hachures are much 'the more effective, and the
alterations of slope can be beautifully traced, but it is
impossible to infer the actual height of the inequa-
lities from them. Contours, on the other hand, are
* A thoroughly satisfactory example of the drawing and shading of
mountains, showing how far, even on a very small scale, minute features
may be brought out, is furnished by the maps in the " Sketch of the
Mountains and River-basins of India," by Mr. Trelawney Saunders (Stan-
ford, 1870). Another on a larger scale by the same geographer ii the map
of "Jerusalem, Ancient and Modern," in the "Historical Atlas of Ancient
Geography " (Murray, 1873).
30 GEOGRAPHY.
much less striking to look at. They do not give the
look of the ground, but they tell you exactly what the
height and slope of it are. Shading is sometimes done
with lines which look like contours, but are not really
so ; and this is misleading.
(3) There are many smaller signs which will give in-
formation if you know how to read them. In the
Ordnance maps you can tell whether a road or rail-
way is in cutting or in embankment ; that is to say,
whether it is below the surface of the country, or
raised above it, since the two are represented dif-
ferently. In fact so complete are these maps that
you can distinguish turnpike roads, cross roads, foot-
paths, canals, and lines of telegraph. (See the list on
page 126.)
40. We have been speaking of maps to a tolerably
large scale. A map of a continent or country is
necessarily to a smaller scale, and such full details as
those just named cannot be got in, but a faithful repre-
sentation of the general face of the land ought to be
given — the valleys and ravines ; the waterpartings ;
the watersheds gradually scored deeper and deeper
with streams ; the rise of the plateaus from the
plains, and their flat tops ; the gradual or sudden
slopes of the hills — we ought to be able on a good
map to see such general features of the country, as
well as the positions of the places. And on such a
map as that of Palestine in the Historical Atlas of
Ancient Geography, all this is evident enough.
41. Before leaving this part of the subject there are
one or two other things to mention. On looking
again at the globe there are some lines which we have
not yet noticed — the tropics of Cancer and
Capricorn, and the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
TROPICS. POLAR CIRCLES. 31
42. The Tropics are two parallels of latitude-
Cancer 2 30 28' north of the Equator, and Capricorn
23 ° 28' south of it. At every spot on the belt of the
earth's surface between those two parallels, on two
days in the year the sun stands right over head at mid-
day. Below the tropic of Capricorn, and above that of
Cancer, he never stands right over-head, at any place,
on any day in the year. Why this is you will find in
the Primer of Astronomy. They are called tropics
from a Greek word meaning to turn, because at those
lines the sun seems to reach one side of his path
and turn back to the other. The space between them
is often called " the tropics," and a country there is
called a " tropical country."
43. The Arctic and Antarctic circles are each the
same distance (230 28') from the North and South
Poles that the tropics are from the Equator. The
Arctic circle is 66° 32' N., and the Antarctic one
66° 32' S. lat. At every spot within these there
is at least one day in the year in which the sun
remains in sight for the whole 24 hours, and at least
one day in which he is out of sight for the whole
24 hours. Thus at the Arctic circle, on June 21st, he
is visible for the whole 24 hours, and on Dec. 21st
he does not appear above the horizon at all. At the
Pole he remains out of sight below the horizon from
Sept. 23rd to March 21st, and from that day till
Sept. 23rd again, he is in sight both day and night,
mounting by June 24th to the height of 23? 28' above
the horizon. The North Cape is in lat. 700 10', or
2%, degrees within the Arctic circle, and by joining
one of Cook's tours you may go there next summer,
and see for yourself the " midsummer, midnight,
Norway sun set into sunrise "' as the poet says.
GEOGRAPHY.
44. Between these tropics and circles lie the
zones or belts, into which the surface of the earth
was for long divided by geographers. There are five
of them. (1) The Torrid Zone, including all the space
between the tropic of Cancer on the north, and the
tropic of Capricorn on the south. Within this space.
460 56' wide from south to north, we have seen that
the noonday sun stands vertical overhead at every spot
twice in every year. (2) The two Temperate Zones,
north and south. They reach from the tropic of Cancer
to the Arctic circle, and from the tropic of Capricorn
to the Antarctic circle. Each is 43 ° 4' wide from
north to south, and in each the sun is never vertical,
but on the other hand there is always a day and a
night — that is to say, the sun rises and sets in each
24 hours throughout the year. (3) The two Frigid
Zones occupy the remaining space. They are each
230 28' from the circle to the Pole, or 460 56' from
circle to circle, measuring over the Pole to the other
side ; and in each, as already explained, during a
part of the year the sun never rises, and during a
part of it he never sets. So much for the tropics and
zones.
45. Mercator's map, you recollect, enabled the sailor
to mark his course as a straight line. But having
got this, and the correct latitude and longitude,
there is still another thing wanted. The map, we
will say, tells the sailor to sail north-east, that is,
half way between north and east ; but how is he to
know where north and east are? For the north
he has to look at ,lhe Pole Star, which stands above
the North Pole, and east is roughly where the sun
is at six in the morning. But suppose it is cloudy
or foggy, and neither sun nor stars can be seen; or
MARINER'S COMPASS.
33
suppose even that it is fine, how is he to maintain
through the day the course which he was able to take
when he saw the Pole Star, or the sun rising ?
46. This he is able to do by the mariner's com-
pass, or needle, which is a straight steel magnet,
balanced on its middle in a box so hung as to
be always level however the ship may be moving.
Being a magnet, the needle always points towards the
north, and as it carries above it a round card divided
into 32 parts or " points," you will see that the head
of the ship can be kept in any direction that the
captain likes. The ship is now being steered in the
34 GEOGRAPHY.
direction of N.N.E., and if, on looking at his map,
the captain saw that he ought to go N.E. by N, he
would alter the helm so that the centre line of the
ship should agree with that point, and all would be
right.
47. The compass was invented in the 12th or 13th
century, no one knows by whom. Before its discover)
ships crept about close to land, or if they ventured
out, as St. Paul's ship did, for an open course of 5 or
600 miles, were at once in the greatest uncertainty
when the sun and stars were hid.
48. I said that the needle pointed towards the
north, but it does not always point exactly to it. In
fact there are only two lines on the earth's surface
along which the needle does point to the true north,
and neither of the two has any connection with parallels
or meridians, but seems to cross them at haphazard.
One of them sweeps up from the Antarctic circle,
enters the east coast of S. America, in S. lat. 240,
a little south of Rio Janeiro, leaves it again at
Cayenne, north of the mouth of the Amazons, crosses
the Atlantic outside the West Indian islands, enters
North America near Cape Hatteras, and runs to a
point north-west of Hudson's Bay. The other line
lies nearly opposite across the world, and is much
more irregular in its course. It too comes up from
the Antarctic circle, and enters South Australia in
E. long. 1290, S. lat. 320, in the Australian Bight.
It leaves it again in King's Sound, lat. 170 S., and
long. 1230 E., and taking a sudden bend to the west,
passes outside of Java, Sumatra, and the Malabar coast,
enters the continent of Asia in E. long. 6o°, runs to the
west of the Caspian, passes between lakes Ladoga and
Onega, and enters the Arctic Sea near the North Cape.
I/O IV THE COMPASS VAR/ES. 3$
49. Along these lines there is no variation of the
compass, but the needle points straight to the true
north ; and as you leave them on either side it
varies. To the east of them it points to the west
of the true north, and to the west of them it points
east of the true north, more and more as you forsake
the lines of no variation. At the south of Greenland
the variation is 50 degrees West, and if you wanted
to steer N.N.E. through Smith's Sound, as the Arctic
Expedition did, you would have to set the ship's
head West by North. (Look at the Compass, fig. 10.)
The variation at London is 190 26' West, at Cork 24°
West, and so on. The lines of variation all over the
world are marked on the Admiralty charts, so that
no mistake need be made.
50. This variation is not always the same at the
same place, but changes year by year or day by day.
It was first noticed by Columbus on Sept. 13, 1492.
In the year 1580 the variation at London was n° 15'
East. In 1660 it had decreased to nothing, and the
needle at London then stood true ; but it immediately
began to vary on the other side, and increased till
1818, when it reached a limit of 24° 30' West; then
it began to decrease, and now the variation there
is 1 90 26' West.
51. The lines of variation come together at two
places. One is north of Hudson's Bay, near Port
Kennedy, in 700 N. lat., 970 W. long. A second is in
the Antarctic regions, 73° S. lat, 1470 E. long. These
points are called magnetic poles, and if you take the
compass-needle to one of them it will behave very
strangely. It will not remain level, but will dip, and
stand straight up and down, the north end down and
the south straight in the air ; also, if it is prevented
B a
36 GEOGRAPHY.
from doing this, and obliged to remain level, it will
turn equally well to all points, just as a common piece
of steel, not a magnet, would do ; in fact over the
magnetic pole the north is nothing to the magnet.
The variation of the needle east or west is called
its declination : the dip up and down, is called its
inclination.
52. Time. Another remark before we close this
part of the Primer. We have seen that the circumfer-
ence of the earth is divided into 360 parts or degrees.
As it goes round on its axis once in 24 hours, its
surface moves at the rate of 15 degrees an hour,
since 15x24 = 360. I am not speaking now of
the movement of the earth round the sun, but of
its motion on its axis only — its rotation, not its
revolution. The sun is standing still at a distance, and
the earth spins round once in 24 hours from west
to east ; and thus every place comes into view of
the sun — which is sunrise ; arrives right opposite
him — which is noonday ; and loses sight of him
again — which is sunset. But move a short distance
on either side of your own place, and each of these
events will happen sooner or later than before. If
you move to the East, sooner ; if to the West,
later. The difference made by moving one minute of
longitude would be 4 seconds of time, and by one
degree of longitude 4 minutes of time.
53. And this explains why, when you go from
the place in which you live to one east of it, your
watch seems to lose. It is not that your watch
loses, but that you have arrived at a place where the
sun comes into view of the earth, and comes to
1 2 o'clock, sooner than where you usually live. Sup-
pose you go from London to Hamburg. Hamburg is
TIME OF TWO PLACES. 37
east of London by 10 degrees of longitude. Now the
earth turns once round, that is through 360 degrees
of longitude, in 24 hours ; and as from London to
Hamburg is 10 degrees, when you are at Hamburg
you are one 36th part of 24 hours, or 40 minutes,
nearer the sun than in London ; that is to say, the
earth arrives at sunrise and at 12 o'clock, 40 minutes
sooner in Hamburg than it does in London. But
your watch keeps London time, and therefore, when
it is 12 o'clock at Hamburg, your watch is 11.20,
because at that moment it is 11.20 at London. In
other words, London will have to travel 40 minutes
farther east before it comes opposite the sun for
12 o'clock. If when it is 12 at Hamburg they
were to telegraph the time from London, it would
be 11.20 ; and if when it is 12 at London they were
to telegraph to you from Hamburg, it would be 12.40
there — Hamburg would have passed 12 o'clock, or the
meridian line, by 40 minutes.
54. Go to a place west of London and the opposite
happens. Take New York, which is 75° West longi-
tude. Now 75 times 4 minutes is 300 minutes, or 5
hours ; that is to say, 5 hours after it has struck 12
o'clock at London, New York will have come whirling
round to the same place at which London was 5 hours
before, and will arrive opposite the sun, and have its
12 o'clock; and meantime London will have gone on
with its day, and its clocks will be striking 5 in the
afternoon. And this accounts for the fact that tele-
graphs arrive in New York from London apparently
before the hour at which they are sent off. Thus,
say the Boat-race is won by Oxford at 1.35 p.m. The
news is telegraphed to New York, and arrives there,
we'll say, by 2 London time. But at 2 London time
38 GEOGRAPHY.
it is only 9 New York time (5 hours earlier), so that
New York actually hears of the event 4 hours and 25
minutes before the hour at which it happened !
55. After the railways were made it was found very
inconvenient to have one time in London and another
at Exeter or Birmingham, and so in all common matters
the towns of England sink their own correct time,
and the clocks are set to that of London. Thus a
train leaving London at 9 arrives at Bristol in 4
hours, and finds the clocks there 1, exactly as they
are in London ; though if the clocks told the correct
time they would show 12.50, Bristol being 20 34' west
of London, equivalent to rather more than 10 minutes
of time. And communication will increase until the
same thing that has been done in England will have
to be done outside of it, and sooner or later all
countries will have to keep London time.
56. As you go farther and farther round the world,
the difference between the hour where you are and the
hour at Greenwich will increase till it reaches 1 2 hours,
and if you sail on till you get back to Greenwich again
you will have gained or lost 24 hours, according as you
sailed east or west — gained if you went east by the Suez
Canal, lost if you went west by America. In the first
case, when you got back, if it were Tuesday on board
the ship, it would be Monday on the newspapers in
London ; in the second case, it would be Tuesday on
board and Wednesday on the newspapers. To correct
this the log or journal of the ship is always altered
when it arrives at the meridian of 1800 (half-way round
the world from London), and a day is added or dropt
in the reckoning as she has sailed East or West. But
the old sailors were not always careful to do this, and
some curious things happened in consequence. When
ANGLE OF NINETY DEGREES. 39
Captain Basil Hall got to Manilla (1200 E. long.) he
found that their Sunday was his Monday. At Tahiti
the reverse has happened, and they keep Sunday on
a Saturday. " At Sitka in Russian America (W. long.
1 3 6°) half the people are Russians who have arrived
from Russia across Asia, and half are Americans who
have come from the United States. Hence when it
is Sunday with the Russians it is Saturday with the
Americans ; and the Russians are busy on Monday,
while the Americans are in church on Sunday, to
the great interruption of business." (See Clarke's
Geographical Reader. ,)
57. Now you can understand what I meant when
I said (§19) that the traveller looked at his chro-
nometer to find the longitude. His chronometer is
set to Greenwich time, and always tells Greenwich
time, and therefore if he finds by his observations
that at the place he is at it is 12 o'clock when his
chronometer is 3, he will know that he is three hours
west of Greenwich, and 3 hours x 15 degrees -45 de-
grees East longitude. So important is this simple
method of finding the longitude that in 17 14 our
Government offered ^30,000 for a chronometer which
would tell it within even so great a distance as thirty
miles !
58. Once more before we leave our globe for
the earth itself, see how these scientific terms
have worked their way into common speech. You
have often heard the expression — " angle of ninety
degrees ;" " angle of forty-five." You remember that
each meridian is divided into 360 degrees over its
whole length. If, therefore, from the Equator over
the Pole, round by the Equator and South Pole to
the starting-point again was 360 degrees, it stands to
GEOGRAPHY.
reason that from the Equator to the Pole will be one
quarter of that, or 90 degrees. From e to n is
Fig. 11.
90 degrees ; and the angle at c, the angle ecn, which
is opposite that opening of 90 degrees, is called
an " angle of 90 degrees," or a " right angle," — that
which a stick makes with the floor when you stand it
quite upright. And an angle of 45 degrees, wed,
is exactly half the angle of 900 — half way between
being level and being upright.
THE EARTH.
59. We will now leave the lines and figures on the
globe, and go to the Earth itself, and the land and
water upon it.
60. In the foregoing account we have spoken of the
earth as a sphere, or an exactly round ball. But this,
though practically true for our purpose then, is not
strictly correct, for the earth is not exactly round.
You can see it is not. The mere roughness of the fields
and roads and hills, not to speak of the high mountains
or the depths of the sea, all tell you that it is not
exactly round. On so big a ball as the earth, how-
ever, these things do not count for much. The
FIGURE OF THE EARTH. 41
highest mountain is not quite 30,000 feet high, and
the deepest place known in the sea is hardly so deep.
Add these together and you have 60,000 feet, and
what is 60 thousand feet to a vast ball like the earth,
which is 42 million feet through ? it is only like the
little roughnesses on the rind of a smooth orange,
or the tiny pits and dots on the shell of an ostrich's
egg. In proportion to an orange the 60 thousand
feet would be the thickness of the paper on
which this page is printed. These, therefore,
may go for nothing.
61. But there are other things, not mere rough-
nesses, but actual differences in the shape or figure
of the earth. The earth has been measured — through,
round, and across; they are still measuring it, and
always coming nearer the truth ; but at present what
we know of its figure is that round the Equator it is
not quite a true circle, but is very, very slightly oval.
Its diameter in *one direction is 7,926^3 statute miles,
and in another 7,924^ miles, a difference of two miles
in nearly 8,000. Then again, from Pole to Pole the
distance is 7,899 statute miles, so that the diameter
there is less than that at the Equator by some 26
miles, and the earth is consequently that much bigger
round the Equator than it is round the Poles ; a
shape which is called an oblate spheroid. Such, as
far as we know at present, are the differences in the
figure of the earth from what it would be if it were
round like a billiard-ball.
62. It has been sometimes said that the difference
in size between the Equator and the Poles has come
from the earth having spun round while it was in a
* Diameter at 150 34' E. long. = 41,852,700 feet
Ditto at 1050 34' E. long. = 41,839,944 do.
Ditto at Poles . . . . = 41,706,858 do.
42 GEOGRAPHY.
soft state, bulging out as a ball of clay might bulge
if put on a wire and made to spin very fast j but we
know too little of the history of the earth at those
early times to allow us to say if the difference in shape
arose from that cause or not. But two things I may
tell you about it. ist. That thin band of 13 miles thick
on a ball of 8,000, is enough to give the sun and moon
such a purchase on the earth that they are gradually
pulling its axis round and altering its attitude with re-
gard to the stars. This is called "the precession of the
equinoxes," and it may cause in time a great change
in climate, and cover England with perpetual ice.
2nd. But for that trivial flattening at the Poles and
projection at the Equator, the sea would not be dis-
tributed over the surface of the earth as it is, but would
be gathered round the Equator, leaving a great conti-
nent of dry land at each Pole.
63. I cannot attempt to give you any idea of the
way in which the earth is measured. It is enough for us
to know that the distances have been exactly measured,
and that they are as I have stated them. But notwith-
standing what I said of the roughnesses of the earth
being comparatively so small, you may naturally ask
how so uneven a body can be measured as if it were
a smooth ball ; and if it will not make a great differ-
ence in the length of the diameter if it is measured
to the top of a mountain or to the bottom of the sea.
And your question is quite right. Such measure-
ments must be taken most exactly to be of use,
and therefore the level of the sea, which is believed
to be about half way between the tops of the moun-
tains and the bottom of the ocean, is chosen as the
surface of the world, and the measurements given
above are those of an oblate spheroid as large as
LAND AND WATER. 43
the earth would be if the dry land were removed, and
the ocean covered everything.
64. But you may still say, " The level of the sea ?
The sea is always rising or falling, and never at one
level." Well, then, the level which is taken in all
such calculations, in the Ordnance Survey of England,
is the average level between high and low water at
Liverpool; and the diameter and circumference of
the earth are the diameter and circumference of a
ball covered with a smooth surface starting at that
height. For many other purposes the level of high-
water at London Bridge, or, as it is called, * Trinity
high-water mark, is taken.
65. Now, on looking at the globe, or a map of the
world, the first thing that must strike every one is
how much more water there is on it than dry
land. The whole surface is 197 millions of square
miles ; but the dry land — that is to say, those parts
of the earth which are high enough to stand up
out of the water — is only at most 52 millions, leaving
145 millions for the ocean. In other words, the land
is about one-quarter of the whole surface, and the
ocean about three-quarters.
66. This is the first thing that strikes us. The
second is, how very unequally the land is arranged.
Instead of being spread evenly all over the sur-*
face, it is collected together, much more to the north
than to the south, and to the east than to the west.
There are 38 million square miles of land above the
Equator, to 13^ below it; in other words, nearly
three times as much. Strangely enough, London is
very nearly in the centre of this mass of land ; and
* Trinity high-water mark. So called from the Trinity House, a corpora-
tion which has ciiargc of pilots, lighthouses, buoys, and othci nautical matters.
GEOGRAPHY.
Fig. 13.
TWO GREAT CONTINENTS. 45
placing ourselves over its position on the globe (as in
fig. 12), we have nine-tenths of the entire land of the
world in view below us. In like manner, New
Zealand, which is opposite England on the other side
of the world, is in the centre of the ocean hemisphere,
and has a waste of water on all sides of it. There is
land round the South Pole, estimated at nearly double
the size of Europe. But of this next to nothing is
known, it is enclosed in eternal ice, without men and
women, apparently without life, and all but inaccessible.
The difference between the land east of London and
the land west of it is also very great, as may be seen
on any general map of the World ; they do not at all
balance, but there are 36 million square miles to
the east, and only 15^ to the west.
67. The third thing that will strike us is that,
though the mass of the land is thus collected in
the northern part of the world, it seems to be
everywhere reaching down towards the south.
South America, Africa, and Australia stretch out like
gigantic fingers and thumb towards the Southern
Pole ; and the same on all sides farther north, for
India, Malacca, Kamschatka, Corea, Florida, and even
Sweden, Norway, and Greenland, all seem to be
pointing down in the same southward direction.
68. Returning to the dry land in the Northern
Hemisphere, and trying to look at it as if we had never
seen or heard of it before, we shall see that it consists
of two great continents or masses, one to the
east and one to the west. For Europe and Asia are
absolutely one continuous tract, with Australasia as
its outlying islands ; and Africa — thougli the con-
nection has been snapt at Gibraltar and Sicily and
the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, and again within the
46 GEOGRAPHY.
last ten years at Suez — is still really part and parcel
of the rest Thus the Old World, looked at as mere
land, and apart from political or historical divisions,
is one great continent. And the New World, too, on
the western side of the globe, is still one continent,
though its upper and lower portions are held together
by a very narrow strip of land.
69. We will now look more closely still at the two
sides of the world, east and west, the Old World and
the New, and see what strikes us about them.
70. In general direction the Old World runs
across the globe, not up and down it. From Cape
de Verde, the most westerly point of Africa, to the
most eastern cape of Asia, the land stretches without
interruption for 174 degrees of longitude, nearly half
the circuit of the world. And its structure or frame-
work lies in the same direction. Through the entire
length of this great continent runs a line of mountains
and high ground, which, notwithstanding a few breaks in
its European portion, forms an almost continuous wall
or chain for the whole distance, rises as it goes east-
ward, attains an enormous height and mass, and seems
to gird, and hem in, and consolidate the vast continent
around and above it. Beginning on the shores of the
Atlantic in the Pyrenees and Atlas, it continues through
the Alps and Carpathians, the Caucasus and the range of
El Burz, to the Hindoo Koosh and the high plateau of
Pamir, called " the roof of the world," which stands
like a huge fortress, 15,000 feet high, to bar the direct
road between east and west. Thence it passes to the
still higher tracts of Tibet, great plains exceeding in
height the highest summits of the Alps, enclosed
between the lofty ramparts of the Himalayas on the
south and the Kuen-Um mountains on the north : and
THE OLD WORLD.
if %
47
Kk
R ' ■
-t^
\%
48 GEOGRAPHY.
thence the mountain wall is prolonged in the ranges of
Yuen-ling, In-shan. and Stanovoi, till it passes finally
to the Pacific Ocean at Behring's Strait.
71. Such is the backbone of the great continent of
the Old World, and like a true backbone it sends out
its ribs and flanks on either side of it. The sierras of
Spain, the Apennines, the Alps of Turkey and Greece,
the Taurus, Zagros, and Suleiman mountains, the
Indian Ghats, and Burman ranges, on the south ; the
Cevennes, the Jura, the Vosges, the Ural, on the
north, form its ribs ; while between and around these
lie the flanks of lowland, such as India and Burmah,
the Steppes, and the great plain of Central Europe and
Northern Asia.
72. The great plain which lies to the north of
this vast mountain barrier is a feature not less remark-
able than itself. Beginning in the Midland Counties
of England, it stretches over the whole width of the
Old World, through the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia,
and Siberia. The Ural mountains alone cross it,
but they hardly alter its character — a wide, gently
swelling, gently sloping plain, stretching from the
mountains to the sea, drained by some of the largest
rivers of the world, and exposed over a great part to
a frightfully cold and inclement climate.
73. These plains and the mountain range have been
of vast importance in the world's history. South of
the mountains, in India, Mesopotamia, Greece, Italy,
Spain, were the ancient seats of civilisation and wealth,
an inviting climate and happy life ; north of them, in
the high plains, were cold, poverty, and barbarism,
fierce hordes of wild and savage men. The Medes who
took Babylon, the Scythians and Parthians who ravaged
Palestine and Egypt, the Huns, Goths, and Vandals who
CENTRAL ASIA. 49
desolated Italy and Spain, the Turks who conquered
both India and Greece, all descended from these lofty
plains ; and all entered the south, and passed from
barbarism to civilisation, through the passes in this
wall of mountains. In modern times this has been re
versed. It is now we of the low warm countries who
are penetrating into the high bleak ones. And one
of the great geographical and commercial problems
of the present day is to find means for bringing down
the wool and minerals from the lofty plains of Tibet
and Cashmere to the lowlands and the sea, in ex-
change for the cloth and the cutlery of Europe.
74. North of Tibet, and enclosed between it and
the Altai mountains, which overlook the long plains of
Siberia, stretch the savage deserts of Gobi and Mon-
golia, the home of the Mongols. West of these, and
reaching from the foot of Pamir to the Caspian, is a
region which has played a most important part in
history — the great district of Turkestan, the original
seat of the Turks and many other European nations.
That immense district, with that of Tibet — which is
distinct from Turkestan, though agreeing with it in
this one feature — has been called the great conti-
nental region, or region of "continental" streams,
because its waters are mostly "contained" within itself.
Tibet is so high, so far inland, and so enclosed, that a
large part of its rivers cannot get to the sea, and have
to empty themselves into lakes. Turkestan, however,
is as low as Tibet is high. From the heights of Pamir,
and the " roof of the world," the mountains suddenly
descend, and two immense rivers, the Amoo Daria and
Sir Daria (Oxus and Jaxartes) rush down to the plains
14,000 feet below. But not to reach the ocean, though
from a different cause than before. While Tibet is
5o GEOGRAPHY.
too lofty and too much shut in, Turkestan is too low,
and the rivers just mentioned and the other streams
of the plains of Turkestan flow either into the Sea
of Aral, which is a few feet above the ocean, or into
the Caspian, which is a few feet below it. In fact
the "continental" region penetrates far into Europe,
and embraces half- of Russia; for the river Volga, the
largest of European rivers, empties itself into the
Caspian and does not come near the ocean. Thus
this region, notwithstanding a difference of many thou-
sand feet in the level of its two portions, has in both
the characteristic that its waters are all contained
within itself. It stretches from within a very few miles
of Petersburg to the neighbourhood of the Yellow Sea,
and contains fully two million square miles.
75. If we now turn to the New World we shall
find that in many respects it forms a striking contrast
to the Old one. Instead of running in the general
direction of the parallels of latitude, east and west,
America stretches almost directly north and south,
along the meridians of longitude ; and instead of
being compact and massive, like the principal part of
the Old World, it is long and straggling, with a large
extent of sea-coast, and with a very near approach to
a separation between its two portions. Instead of its
centre being occupied by a great mass of highlands,
guarded by mountains all but impossible to climb/
and when climbed cold, bleak, barren, and desert,
contained within itself and shut off from the rest of
creation — the mountains of America are mostly ranged
close to one of its coasts, and its lowlands abound in
splendid rivers, which form natural roads to every part
of the country, and make the vast continents of South
and North America in great part accessible from the
THE NEW WORLD.
GEOGRAPHY.
sea to steamers. Its remarkable features are its
mountains, plains, and rivers— the mountains of
huge height and great beauty, and containing more
active volcanoes than any other range, the plains the
largest and the rivers the most extensive that the world
possesses.
76. It is the position of the mountains that first
strikes the eye. In South America the Andes, as the
mountains are called, run close to the western side of
the continent — a continuous chain of 4,000 miles in
length, often of double and triple parallel ridges, at a
mean height of 11,000 feet, with great active volcanoes,
and numerous peaks varying from 16,000 to 24,000
feet in height. At the Isthmus they are interrupted ;
but immediately start again, and under the name of
the Rocky mountains run in the same northerly
direction, though at a greater distance from the
sea-coast, through the United States and British
America, till they end on the shore of the Arctic
Ocean, after an almost unbroken course of more
than 8,000 miles. Such a range, so vast, so lofty,
so precipitous, so volcanic, so regular, is unparalleled
in the world. But it is even more astonishing when
taken in connection with the enormous rivers to
which it gives rise.
77. The rivers of America are the largest in the
world, not only for their length and volume of water,
but for the extent of their basins. (§200.) In South
America three rivers, the Orinoco, the Amazons, and
the La Plata, take three-quarters of the whole drainage
of the country to the Atlantic, and each of these
draws a large amount of its supply from the flanks
of the Andes. Thus the curious sight is presented
of rivers rising within a short distance of one ocean,
RIVERS OF SOUTH AMERICA. 53
and being compelled to traverse thousands of miles
to cast themselves into another. In this respect
they find a likeness, though on a smaller scale, in
the Po ; which, while it rises in the maritime Alps
near the Gulf of Genoa, is compelled to cross the
whole of the plains of Lombardy to discharge itself
into the opposite sea of the Adriatic. So also in
South-eastern Australia, the Murray river rises be-
hind Brisbane, within 100 miles of the Pacific, and
yet runs 1,000 miles, to enter the Southern Ocean at
Adelaide. In North America the Mississippi and Mis-
souri receive much of their drainage from the Rocky
mountains, and run a course even longer than that of
the Amazons j but the picture is not so startling as
that in South America, because the Rocky mountains
stretch much farther from the west coast than the
Andes do, and because the rivers do not cross the con-
tinent so directly, but derive much of their water from
the Alleghany mountains on the east coast, and the
low watershed about Lake Superior in the north. But
to return to South America. A great part of it may
be roughly described as an alluvial plain of more than
2,000 miles long, sloping very gently up from the
Atlantic to a prodigious ridge of. mountains on the
extreme edge of its farther side. True the centre of
the country is occupied by an important plateau,
which gives birth to other considerable rivers, but it
sinks into insignificance when measured against the
Andes, and does not interfere with the general truth
of the rough description just given.
78. The New World has its "continental" districts,
but on a smaller scale than that of Central Asia.
One is in the bosom of the Bolivian Andes, a plateau
of about i, 1 00 miles in length by 120 wide, and from
$4 GEOGRAPHY.
12 to 13,000 feet high, where there is a large lake
called Titicaca, and other lakes, which receive the
rivers of the plateau. Another is the Great Salt Lake
district of Utah in North America, between the Rocky-
mountains and the Sierra Nevada, 500 miles by 280,
and from 4,000 to 5,000 feet high, the waters of which
have no outlet and form a series of salt lakes.
79. But the most remarkable lakes of America are the
fresh water ones of the Northern Continent, which have
no parallel elsewhere. They are scattered more or
less over the whole of British America, chiefly in
its central and southern portions, on the northern
slopes of the upper waterparting of the Missouri
and Mississippi ; and they form the largest mass
of fresh water on the surface of the earth. In the
northern portion, the Hudson's Bay Territory, there
are lakes of large area — such as Great Slave Lake,
12,000 square miles, Great Bear Lake, 10,000, Winni-
peg, 9,000. But they are far surpassed by those some-
what farther south. These are five in number, each
running into the other, and each lower than the last —
Lake Superior, 627 feet above sea-level, Huron and
Michigan 590, Erie 564, and Ontario 232, from which
the river St. Lawrence leads direct into the Atlantic.
Between Erie and Ontario are the Falls of Niagara.
Lake Superior is the size of Ireland, and 900 feet
deep. The depth of some of the others is still greater.
They cover in all 94,000 square miles, and form
nearly one-third of the basin of the St. Lawrence;
their beds go down to 400 feet below the sea-level ;
and they contain more than half the fresh water of
the globe.
80. But there are other points in which the New
World is unlike the Old one.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COUNTRIES.
The natural circumstances which make the most
important and radical differences between continents or
countries, and give one an advantage over another,
independent of the energy of its inhabitants, are
three : —
i. Length and indentation of coast- line or
seaboard.
2. Long, large, navigable rivers.
3. Good climate.
Of these, coast-line means length of shore, with
bays, gulfs, estuaries, and headlands ; to shelter ship-
ping, to be occupied with towns and villages, fisheries,
ship-yards, harbours, docks, and industry and civilisa-
tion of all kinds, and to nurture the independence
and love of adventure which are the virtues of sailors.
Rivers mean easy communication with the interior,
so that the productions of other countries may be sent
up to the inland places, and those of the country
itself brought down for export. And good climate
means those natural conditions of heat and weather
and health, without which it is not possible to use the
two other advantages when you have got diem.
81. Now looking at the world in the light of these
three conditions, it is easy to see the difference between
its different parts, and how the division of the Old World
into three continents came about. For though, as we
have already seen, the Old World is one great mass
of land, yet when employed in the service of man it
naturally divides itself into the well-known three por-
tions of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Africa has
in many parts a poor coast-line, few harbours, few rivers
for its size, and much unhealthy climate ; and with
the exception of Egypt, Algeria, the Cape Colonies,
and a few other places on the coast, the whole of that
56 GEOGRAPHY.
immense expanse of land, 12 millions of square miles,
abounding in rich resources, may be said to be given
over to barbarism, idleness, and cruelty. The tse-tse
fly, fatal to horses and cattle, is alone enough to
prevent the spread of agriculture in certain districts.
Egypt and the Cape owe their prosperity mainly to the
Nile and the harbours of Simon's Bay and Algoa Bay.
What might Africa not be at this moment if its vast
bulk were pierced by a Baltic or a Mediterranean Sen,
which would admit ships and commerce with their
civilising influences to penetrate into its interior !
82. Of the mainland of Asia, India and China are
the only fully peopled, industrious, prosperous portion.
And why ? because China has an indented coast-line
with estuaries and harbours ; and both have large, long,
navigable rivers, and climates, which though not ab-
solutely good are yet quite tolerable. On the other
hand Arabia, with a rocky inaccessible sea-coast, and
no rivers, is a desert. Persia is almost equally without
means of access, and equally desert. The countries of
Central Asia are cut off from the rest of the world by
their height, and want of connection with the sea,
and their severe climate; while the people of the
vast plains of Siberia, one-fourth larger than the
whole of Europe, watered by three of the noblest
rivers in the world, have these advantages neutralised
by the extreme cold, and, like the districts last men-
tioned, are wild and uncivilised, and mainlydependent
on hunting or fishing and other casual modes of life.
The population of Siberia is not as much as one
inhabitant to a square mile.
8$. With all this Europe is in happy contrast.
In length of coast-line it is far better off than the
other continents. For while Asia has but one mile of
NATURAL ADVANTAGES OF EUROPE.
57
coast to 533 square miles of surface, and Africa one
to 420, Europe, with an area of 3,700,000 square
miles, has 19,500 miles of coast, or one mile to every
190 square miles of surface, and out of the whole
19,500 not more than 3,000 are difficult of access.
No natural circumstances more favourable to navi-
Fig. 16.
gation and commerce can be imagined than the deeply
indented coasts of Asia Minor, and the Grecian Archi-
pelago— where European commerce first fixed itself
— Italy with its double seaboard and its three greai
adjacent islands, or the equally irregular outline of
England, Scotland, and Ireland. Compare a coast like
Greece (fig. 16) with that of Ceylon (fig. 17), which has
few indentations, even if those few be important, and
the inferiority of the latter to the former as a nurse of
maritime life must be evident.
84. The rivers of Europe, though far behind those of
Asia for size, are far before them for convenience and
advantage. Spain is deficient in navigable streams,
and suffers in consequence, but the Danube, the
Rhine, the Seine, the Loire, the Elbe, the Po, and
GEOGRAPHY.
Fig. 17.
the Vistula, with their hundreds of brandies, form
splendid roads, up and down which commerce pours
its tides between the heart of the continent and the
ocean, and, beyond the ocean, the ports and rivers of
other countries. The Russian rivers are worthy of
consideration by themselves, for their great size, their
navigableness, and the flatness of the country which
they drain ; so gently swelling as to enable canals to
be made between the rivers, by which boats can pass
from the White Sea and the Baltic to the Caspian, the
Black Sea, and thence to the Mediterranean. But
pre-eminent above them all, in the true qualities of
a useful civilising river, is the Thames, which, though
smaller than any of those mentioned, surpasses every
one for convenience and for the manner in which it is
fitted to the requirements of commerce.
CLIMATE. COMMERCE. 59
85. In climate Europe is equally fortunate. The
line of permanent frost, or average temperature at
freezing-point throughout the year, which includes a
large part of Northern Asia, only touches Lapland
and the north-east corner of Russia j while the
line of 700 mean annual temperature sweeps just
past its southern shores. It thus escapes both
extremes. It has neither the long droughts nor the
violent deluges of rain which afflict Asia and Africa,
nor the typhoon winds and sudden cyclone waves
which destroy so many thousands of people ; every-
thing is equable, steady, and beneficent. The ocean
isolates it from the Polar regions, softens and equalises
the temperature of its coasts; the Gulf Stream cherishes
and moistens its western shores ; while the great
furnace of Africa is near enough to send its warmth
across the Mediterranean to the countries opposite.
Commerce— with all its evils, the grand instru-
ment of civilisation in the world — if not European
by birth is so by adoption. Here, as in its river,
England is pre-eminent. What Europe is to Asia and
Africa, Great Britain is to Europe. Trade, which
began in Phoenicia, moved westward through the
promontories and islands of Greece, through the
lagoons of the Adriatic, and the creeks and harbours
of the Riviera, through Spain and Holland, to arrive
at last at our favoured isle ; where no day is too hot
and no day too cold for work, where business is never
interrupted by frozen rivers, or destructive floods, or
tremendous tempests, or any other of those operations
of nature which must seriously injure the commerce
even of other European countries.
86. Looked at in the light of their adaptation to
man's necessities, we see, therefore, that the ancient
6o GEOGRAPHY.
division of the Old World into the three continents
of Europe, Asia, and Africa was a natural, necessary,
and reasonable one.
87. And when we cross the ocean to the New
World, which the ancients did not know, we find
similar conditions leading to similar results. South
America, as we have seen, has a splendid system
of rivers ; its natural productions are of great luxuri-
ance and value; its coast-line is 16,500 miles to
6,800,000 square miles of surface — or 1 to 420 ; but
it wants harbours, and the heat, the moisture, the
inundation of the rivers, and the plague of insects
and reptiles, prevent these advantages being enjoyed,
and give it a population less in proportion to its size
than even Persia or Arabia.
88. The conditions of Australia are in many respects
equally unfavourable. Lying, as it does, between S. lat.
ii° and 390, the heat even on the sea-coast is often
overpowering; the rainfall is small, and scorching
winds and long droughts are frequent, though the cli-
mate is healthy. The mass of land is nearly as solid as
that of Africa. The Gulf of Carpentaria is a fine inland
sea ; the harbours of Port Jackson and Port Philip are
magnificent, and there are other inlets and estuaries,
but a large part of the coast is very unsuited for navi-
gation. The rivers are few, and with the exception of
the Murray small and shallow. The Murray is 1,200
miles long, and drains a basin of more than 200,000
square miles — more than twice as much as England,
Wales, and Scotland ; but its entrance is closed
by a bar, it has only two affluents of importance,
and the other rivers are mostly mountain streams,
rushing torrents in winter, and dry beds in summer,
so that internal communicatio'n by those channels is
AUSTRALIA. NORTH AMERICA. 61
impossible. A great part of the centre seems to be a
depressed basin, and to consist of a sand)-, waterless,
burning desert. And although this is being gradually-
encroached on, and may ultimately be reclaimed, it
will be so by the energy of the British race working
against great natural difficulties.
89. It is in North America that we find the
nearest approach to the favourable conditions of
Europe, making it practically a separate continent
from South America. Its area is 8,600,000 square
miles, and its coast-line 24,500 miles long, so that it
has a mile of shore to each 350 miles of surface. It
is true that about 7,000 miles of the coast are within
the Arctic circle, and therefore useless for navigation,
and the western coast, on the Pacific, is not much
indented ; but the eastern side, from Newfoundland to
Cape Hatteras, is full of inlets, bays, outlying islands,
peninsulas, and harbours, admirably fit for shipping.
The rivers of North America are the largest in the
world. The Mississippi and Missouri spread their
countless arms over a basin twelve times the size of
Great Britain. Some of their branches are mighty
rivers, and the two main streams are navigable for
more than 4,500 miles from the sea. The St. Law-
rence, the Hudson, Susquehanna, Delaware, Potomac,
and James, are fine navigable rivers, with large cities
on their banks or at their mouths. In climate North
America is less happy than England. Owing to
the size of the continent, and the consequent dis-
tance of its interior from the sea, as well as its
direct connection with the Arctic regions, the heat in
summer and the cold in winter are greater than they
are with us ; and the enormous scale of the rivers
exposes them to floods and other drawbacks which
62 GEOGRAPHY.
would seriously interfere with commerce, but for the
indomitable energy and activity of the people.
THE OCEAN.
90. So far for a general rough idea of the nature
and position of the dry land of the world. About its
various masses, round the peninsulas and headlands,
into the bays and gulfs, and through the straits and
passages, circulates the wide and ever-flowing ocean,
filling up the deep hollows between the continents
and islands, distributing warmth and life throughout,
and affording a ready means of communication all
over the world.
91. I have already said that it is estimated to
cover 145 millions of square miles, about three
times the surface of the land. This great body of
water is one and undivided. True, Africa, South
America, and Australia do, as we have seen, pro-
ject down towards the South Pole, and hinder the
waves from flowing straight on from east to west
or west to east, but the waves make their way round
these obstacles, and every particle of the surface
water probably visits in turn every part of the ocean,
and every nook and corner of the shore. Through
Behring's Strait and Baffin's Bay and the seas of
Greenland and Kara, currents are constantly running
to interchange the warm water of the Equator with
the cold water of the Poles. Even in such enclosed
places as the Baltic, the Red Sea, and the Mediter-
ranean, there is always a current running in and
another current running out.
92. But though all one great body of water, the
gea naturally divides itself on the map into five main
THE ATLANTIC. 63
portions — the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the
Arctic, and the Antarctic Oceans.
93. The Atlantic is the one which most nearly
concerns us. It forms the channel between Europe
and Africa on the one hand, and America on the other.
In general form it is long and winding, the coasts
on one side curiously answering in outline to those
on the other. From north to south, from Iceland to
Cape Horn, it is 8,000 miles long. Its northern
portion, say between Lisbon and New York, is 3,400
miles wide. Between Sierra Leone on the coast of
Africa and the opposite shoulder of South America
it narrows to less than 1,800, and then widens south-
ward, until from the Cape of Good Hope to Monte
Video it is 4,300 miles.
94. Now there are two things which in the main
give an ocean importance in the world, and an ad-
vantage over another ocean, and these two are length
of coast-line and extent of basin, that is of rivers
which run into it (see § 200) ; both add to its com-
merce, to the number of ships which sail upon it, and
of people who live by it ; and both of these the Atlantic
has got to a far larger extent than either of the other
oceans. In addition to the long smooth shores of
Western Africa and Eastern South America, all the in-
dentations and windings of the North American coast,
the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, the bays and
inlets along the shores of the United States, Nova
Scotia, Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, all
immensely increase the length of the coast, and the
opportunity for shipping ; even Hudson's Bay and
Strait may possibly be some day or other full of
inhabitants. In Europe the coasts which lie open
to the Atlantic are themselves indented and winding
64 GEOGRAPHY.
enough, and full of harbours, refuges, and estuaries ;
but add to these the extra recesses, hidden, as it were,
in the background, of the Mediterranean, Adriatic,
and Black Sea, the Baltic, Gulf of Finland, and Gulf
of Bothnia, and you more than double the length.
The coast-line of the Atlantic on the whole is calcu-
lated at about 55,000 English miles.
95. Closely connected with this is the area of its
basin. Owing to the Andes and Rocky mountains
being set back so close to the Pacific, all the large
rivers of South America and the greater part of those
of North America run eastward into the Atlantic,
which thus gets the lion's share of the supply. In fact
it takes the water of six-sevenths of the whole of
America. From Europe, chiefly through the Baltic
and Mediterranean, it has the water of every river
except the Volga, and the Mediterranean enables it
to get the Nile from Africa, in addition to the Niger,
the Gambia, and other large rivers outside on the
coast. The amount of land drained by all these rivers
on both sides of the Atlantic is estimated at 19 millions
of square miles, 2^ times as much as supplies the
Pacific, though the Pacific itself is much larger than
the Atlantic. And when we recollect the countless
myriads of people who exist on a large part of these
19 millions of square miles — the leading nations of
the world, whose welfare and occupations are all
more or less closely connected with the great Atlantic
and dependent on it, whose lives are bound up with
the freight of its vessels and the letters of its mails —
we shall begin to realise how mighty a part a great
ocean may play in the world, and how " rivers" and
" drainage " and " coast-line? " and " basins " can
make one ocean more important than another.
THE PACIFIC. 65
96. The Pacific differs from the Atlantic in almost
every respect, except that it is an ocean. It differs in
shape, in area, in extent of basin, in the number
and character of its islands. In shape it is a vast
field of waters. Instead of the free open look of the
Atlantic, the highway of the world, we find an enor-
mous bay, closed at the top, except by the narrow inlet
of Behring's Strait, and barred across a large portion
of its width by a confused crowd of islands. Its coasts
are formed by the long mountain-line of America on
the east, and the archipelago of Australasia and Japan
on the west. From North to South — the Aleutian
islands to Cape Horn — it is 7,000 miles ; while its
width at the Equator is of the enormous length of
more than 10,000. Its area is estimated at more
than 67 millions of square miles — more than that
of all the dry land of the earth put together. And
yet, though its area is so large, its basin is computed at
not half that of the Atlantic. On the American coast
few important rivers feed it, and the basin is hemmed in
by the Rocky mountains and Andes. On the Asiatic
side it is more fortunate, as it receives the Amoor, and
the great rivers of China, Cambodia, and Malacca.
It is surrounded by volcanoes — those of America on
the east, of the Sunda and Philippines on the west,
the Kuriles and Aleutian islands on the north, and
of the Sandwich, Marquesas, and Society islands in its
bosom. Of the 250 active volcanoes enumerated by
Humboldt, 226 are in and around this ocean. Another
remarkable feature consists in its coral islands and
reefs, of which there are vast numbers of all sizes,
extending over more than 100 degrees of longitude
and rising from enormous depths.
97. Third in the list is the Indian Ocean,
C
66 GEOGRAPHY.
separated from the Pacific by Australia and the Asiatic
Archipelago, and from the Atlantic by Africa, and
smaller than either of the preceding. It is truly a
double bay of very large size, which forces its way up
into the land by the two lesser bays of Arabia and
Bengal, and still further by the long narrow inlets of
the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Indian Ocean
is estimatedio cover 29 millions of miles. Its basin is
very important, being nothing less than the whole of
India and Burmah, including, among many others, the
four great rivers, Indus, Ganges, Brahmapootra, and
Irawady, which alone discharge the waters of a million
and a quarter of square miles into it, as well as the
Tigris and Euphrates from Armenia, and the Zambesi
from Africa. This ocean also contains coral reefs and
islands, though not nearly so many as the Pacific does.
Its most striking feature lies in its periodical winds,
called monsoons, which take the place of the trade-
winds of the Atlantic and Pacific, are vital to the
navigation, and have a great effect on the climate of
India. It is also much exposed to tornadoes or
sudden tempests of the most furious and destructive
kind, as at Midnapore, in 1874, when 3,000 people
died from the buffeting of the wind alone ; and to
cyclone waves like that of October 31st, 1876, at
Backergunge, when 215,000 persons perished in an
hour.
9S. North and south of the three main oceans
lie the Arctic and Antarctic portions or seas. Of the
two the Arctic is the best known, partly because
it is nearer home, partly because it is more accessible.
Here, as often elsewhere, commerce led the way.
North-Polar exploration began from the early en-
deavour to find a " North-west Passage " for the
ARCTIC OCEAN. 67
Indian trade. Greenland, Nova Zembla, Spitzbergen,
and the north coasts of Siberia and of North America,
which surround the North Pole, have been to a great
extent explored and mapped as far north as latitude
830 20' 27". There are even inhabitants up to 8i°;
the summer, though short, is warm, and vegetation
and animals feeding on it have been found as far
as 830. The Arctic Expedition of 1875 killed musk-
oxen, hares, and ptarmigan, in latitude 820. The ice-
bergs, which during the warmer months move down
from Baffin's Bay, cling to the coast of Labrador and
Newfoundland, and are rarely seen in the open ocean
south of Halifax (lat. 440 39'), or farther east than
40" W. longitude, and there are fast melting away from
the influence of the Gulf Stream. Whereas in the
south the icebergs advance across the whole ocean as
far as 450 and even 400 S. latitude, and make navi-
gation very hazardous beyond that line. They even
drift as far as the Cape of Good Hope, a latitude
equivalent to that of Gibraltar. In Chili glaciers
come down to the sea at a latitude equal to that of
Venice. On the few islands found in the Antarctic
Sea, the vegetation is of the lowest forms, and the
only animal life, birds and seals. The Antarctic
continent surrounding the South Pole, has been esti-
mated at twice the size of Europe. Portions of it
have been seen at Victoria Land, with its two great
volcanoes, Erebus and Terror — and at Graham and
Enderby Land ; but the great bulk of it is hidden
behind an impenetrable wall of permanent ice. Even
in summer the temperature of the air is never above
the freezing-point, and the snow there never thaws.
99. One main reason of this difference between
the Arctic and Antarctic Seas lies in the currents
c 2
GEOGRAPHY.
which exist in the ocean, and the greater circulation
of warm water in the former of the two. It is
hardly necessary to say that the sea is never still;
but many may not be aware that the waves do not
always move forward when they seem to do so,
and that unless a current is running in the
water, the waves only move up and down, and not
forward, when the sea is agitated. But there are
currents in the sea, running through it with definite
breadth, just as if they were rivers ; and there are
the Tides, which are an essential part of the ocean j
and there are also winds which blow constantly, or
for certain seasons, in steady directions over it ; and
these must all be understood if we wish to know about
the sea.
ioo. Of the winds, the chief are the trade- winds
and the monsoons. The trade-winds are perennial,
that is they blow during the entire year in one general
direction, a regular steady wind from east to west.
This they do in the Atlantic and the Pacific, from one
year's end to another, in a width or belt of about
30 degrees on each side of the Equator. These
winds are great helps to navigation, but before the
invention of steamers they were all-important, and
in fact got their name from the assistance they gave
to trade. Every ship which sailed from Europe to
the West Indies, the Brazils, India, or Peru, had to
pass through "the Trades ;" and during some 50 or 60
degrees of latitude was likely there to find a pretty
steady wind to help it on its course. And the same
for those who sailed between the West Coast of
America and China or India. The trade-winds have
left their mark on the map of the West Indies in the
names of the " Windward islands " and " Leeward
TRADE-WINDS. MONSOONS. CURRENTS. 69
islands ;" the former being those from Trinidad to
Martinique, which directly meet the wind, and the
latter those from Dominica to Porto Rico, which
slope away from it.
1 01. In the Indian Ocean also the wind blows from
east to west from November to March ; but from
April to October, owing perhaps to the heat accu-
mulated on the mainland during the solstice, it turns
round and blows from the south-west, and in so doing
brings the rain on the coast of India. This is called
in India the monsoon, and such an alternating or
changing wind is called periodical.
102. Connected with the winds are the ocean
currents, which, though partly springing from other
causes, are much influenced by their constant blowing.
There are few parts of the ocean in which a current
is not to be found running as fast as 10 miles a
day, and sometimes much faster. The chief are the
equatorial currents, which flow round the globe,
or wherever the land will let them flow, in the
same direction as the trade-winds- -enormous rivers
coursing through the ocean. In the Atlantic one of
these great streams starts from St. Thomas on the
coast of Africa, and runs westward towards the
shoulder of South America. Before arriving there it
throws off a branch to the south, which goes along
down the coast of Brazil to the southern end of
South America, and there turns to the eastward
towards the Cape of Good Hope. But this is not a
very important current.
103. The main stream is very much larger and
more important ; indeed to us it is nearly the most
important thing in the world. It runs nearly due west,
about 5 degrees or 350 miles wide, and at a pace of
7o GEOGRAPHY.
from 20 to 50 miles a day. It sweeps past the north
coast of South America with such strength that not even
the immense streams rushing out of the Amazons and
Orinoco rivers are enough to turn it aside ; passes
through the Windward islands, across the Caribbean
Sea, and into the Gulf of Mexico, an enormous ocean
lake with only two outlets, hemmed in by mountains,
and exposed to the full heat of the tropical sun. As
the current sweeps round the Gulf it becomes very
hot, and is swollen by the waters of the Mississippi,
till at length it forces its way out into the Atlantic
between Florida and Cuba in a stream of from 30 to
40 miles wide and 600 or 700 feet deep, and at a
pace of about 80 miles a day. The Thames at
London Bridge is barely 900 feet wide, and the sea from
Dover to Calais is 2 1 miles. These two dimensions
will help you to understand what an immense body of
water the Gulf Stream is. Its heat when it leaves the
Gulf is from 75 ° to 85 ° Fahr. At first it keeps pretty
close to the coast of America, but by degrees widens
out and bears away to the east, running between
Newfoundland and the Azores. There it parts ; the
main body turns round the Azores and goes off south-
ward between those islands and Spain, down to the
African coast. The other portion runs on northward
between Great Britain and Iceland, bestowing warmth
and moisture on Cornwall, Ireland, the Hebrides, and
the Shetland islands, as it goes, and throwing forward
a stream which bears the weeds and seeds of the
New World as far as the coast of Norway and even
Spitzbergen, and perhaps even the North Pole.
104. This is the famous Gulf Stream, which is
poured out of the Gulf of Mexico as out of a vast
tank of hot water, to cherish and fertilise the shores of
THE GULF STREAM. 71
European and even Arctic countries, thousands of
miles distant from its source. This it is which makes
the astonishing difference in climate between our
shores and those of North America in the same
latitudes ; which enables myrtles, oleanders, and
oranges to flourish in the open air on the coast of
Cornwall, while Newfoundland in the same latitude
is shut in with icebergs ; gives us a beautiful verdant
country like the Western Highlands in place of the
iron-bound coast of Labrador ; and causes the ex-
traordinary fact that no polar ice has ever been known
to visit the North Cape of Norway, in latitude 720, the
same latitude with Disco island, on the west coast of
Greenland, which may be called the home of ice-
bergs. But the northward motion of the Gulf Stream
necessitates a southward motion from the Polar Seas.
Immediately beneath the Gulf Stream, and on the
inner or land side of it, runs a current of cold water
from past Labrador, to replace the warm water brought
up from the tropics ; and below that again is found
a still colder stratum, which has probably travelled up
the bed of the Atlantic from the Southern Pole.
Such and so constant is the motion and interchange
throughout the water of the sea.
105. In the Pacific also there is a great equatorial
current which starts from the Bay of Panama and runs
right across the ocean, past the Caroline and Ladrone
islands to the Philippines. There it is met by a cur-
rent which issues from the China Sea much as the Gulf
Stream does from the Gulf of Mexico, and the two
then run outside of Japan, and round the northern
limits of the Pacific, and so down again to California.
106. In the Indian Ocean the main current starts
from the Bay of Bengal, sweeps past Ceylon and the
72 GEOGRAPHY.
Seychelles islands, and between Africa and Madagascar
to the Cape of Good Hope. There it is suddenly
checked, partly by the Agulhas bank and partly by
the sudden cold of the Southern Ocean, and turned
back to the south-west towards Kerguelen island.
107. There are many other currents besides those
named, but these are the chief, and will give an idea
of the ceaseless change going on in the ocean.
For wherever water is moved away, other water must
naturally come in to take its place. — And thus what I
said before is true, that every particle of water probably
visits in turn every part of the world.
108. The sea is however stirred to its lowest depths
twice every day by a movement of a different kind to
those just spoken of. The currents are the earth's
own action. They are caused by the natural tendency
of warm and cold water to change places, helped
by the rotation of the earth, and by the force of
winds blowing constantly one way on the surface.
But the tides come entirely from outside — the earth
herself has nothing to do with them, any more than
she has with her spinning round the sun ; and they
move the ocean to its deepest recesses.
109. They are the rise formed in the water of the sea
by the attraction of the sun and moon, principally of
the moon. The moon attracts all things on the earth,
pulls them towards it j and water being fluid changes
its shape as it is pulled, and rises up towards the
moon in a large heap or wen. But as the earth is
spinning round all the time, the water is carried
on and will not rise quite in the same shape that
it would if it were at rest, but gets spread out into a
broad flat wave. This tidal-wave goes travelling along
over the surface of the sea, following the moon, and
THE TIDES. 73
always two or three hours behind it ; and as it comes
to the various places along the coast it forms high
tide there. The moon raises a similar heap of
water on the opposite side of the world at the same
time ; so that there are always two tidal-waves going
round at once, each half a day apart. The sun also
attracts the water, though, from being so far off, much
less than the moon does. When the two come in a
line and pull together — that is at full moon and new
moon — the tide is highest, and is called spring
tide *. when they are at right angles to one another
— that is at the moon's quarters — the tide is lowest,
and is neap tide.
no. This is the general principle of the tides,
but it is very much interfered with by the form of
the coast, the depth of the sea, the friction of the
water on itself and on the shore, the action of wind,
the ocean currents, and many other things. The
original height of the tide-wave — the heap of water
raised by the moon — is from 3 to 4 feet, and
that is the rise of the tide in the open ocean of
the Pacific ; but where there is a bay or inlet with
high steep walls the water will force its way in, and
rise much higher. In the Bristol Channel, which is
like a funnel with its mouth turned outwards to the
ocean, the. tides are forced up as high as 30, and, at
Chepstow, 50 feet ; and in the Bay of Fundy, in
Nova Scotia, to 70, 80, and even 100. On the coast
of Jutland, in the German Ocean, owing to the tide-
wave from the north meeting that from the south,
round Great Britain, there is little or no variation,
but perpetual high water. You will find all this
explained at length in the Elementary Lessons in
Astronomy (§§659-667). I have mentioned it because
c *
74 GEOGRAPHY.
no account of the ocean can be complete without
some description of the tides.
in. The surface of the ocean has been pretty well
known for a long time, but the inside of it — its
depths, the shape and nature of the bottom, the heat
at various depths, how the deep currents run, anil
where the various layers of warm and cold water
come from and go to — these have only been begun
to be found out quite lately. The Americans took the
lead. Captain Maury, of the U.S. navy, was the first
investigator, and was followed by the U.S. surveying and
sounding expedition of the Tuscarora (1873-76). The
Germans sent out the Gazelle in 1875. Among our
own expeditions were those of the Bulldog, Porcupine,
and Lightning, from i860 to 1870, and lastly that of the
Challenger man-of-war (1874-76), of which Sir George
Nares was commander (till he was sent to the North
Pole in 1875), and Sir Wyville Thomson chief of
the scientific department. In the Atlantic, soundings
enough have been taken to enable a general rough map
of the bottom to be made, of which I have attempted
to give you a view, as if the water were all away,
and the dry bed could be seen.
112. It shews the bed of the ocean from the
Cape of Good Hope to Iceland to consist of a ridge
running pretty nearly midway between America,
Europe, and Africa, and following in a general way the
winding of those continents. This ridge rises to within
8,500 or 10,000 feet of the waves. On each side of
it, west and east, there is a valley, which sinks in some
places as fat as 19,000, 21,000, and even 23,000 feet
below the waves. Of the two valleys, the eastern one
passes east of the Azores, and round the outside of
Ireland. Off Newfoundland the western valley parts :
BED OF THE ATLANTIC.
76 GEOGRAPHY.
one fork leads into Davis's Strait, the other runs on to
Iceland. The three deepest spots known are south-
east of Bermuda, off Porto Rico, and midway between
South America and South Africa. South of S. lat. 30
the depths are comparatively moderate, not greater
than 16,000 and 17,000 feet, and rarely as great.
113. Although the general level of the ridge is 8,000
or 10,000 feet below the waves, yet here and there
it rises far above them. The Azores, Ascension, and
St. Helena, are peaks of this ridge, and tower
above the adjoining valleys to a height of more than
20,000 feet. The Cape de Verde islands, the
Canaries, and Madeira stand on plateaus of theii
own, outliers of Africa. Bermuda is also off the ridge,
and curiously isolated, being a mountain of 15,000
feet high, with a base over 100 miles wide, standing
on ground which seems to fall away on each side, and
to have no other high land in sight, nearer than the
American coast, 600 miles off.
114. To get some idea of the general nature of the
ocean bed let us take the lowest levels of the valleys
just named as a starting-point — equivalent to the
"level of the sea" from which the heights of mountains
on dry land are calculated. We shall find that the
Peak of Teneriffe, which rises 12,180 feet above the
ocean, if the sea were dry would really stand up
34,900 feet above the bottom ; while in the Azores and
Cape de Verde islands there are several peaks that
would soar to 28,000 and 30,000 feet above the
ocean bed. None of these would seem to have any
sudden rise, indeed their slopes appear to be gentler
than those of the European mountains.
115. We may further obtain a comparative idea of
the height of the submarine mountains of the Atlantic
BED OF THE OCEAN. 77
by supposing that Europe and Asia were covered by
the ocean to a depth of 23,000 feet above tne lowest
ground, that being the greatest depth yet obtained by
sounding. In this case not a vestige of land would be
seen in Europe. The summit of Mont Blanc would
be buried 5,000 feet below the surface, and the highest
of the Pyrenees more than 11,000. Ararat would be
nowhere ; and the first land which would meet the view
would be the group of islets formed by 16 or 18 of the
highest mountains in the Himalayas and Tibet as they
rose above the waves, some just emerging and others
reaching a height of about 7,000 feet.
1 1 6. The Pacific has been less extensively sounded
than the Atlantic, but some extraordinary depths have
been discovered there — one south of the Ladrone
islands, of 27,450 feet; another off the Kurile islands,
of 27,930 feet ; and a third outside the centre island
of Japan, where 27,858 feet of line was let out with-
out finding bottom. Fusi-yama in Japan is 14,177
feet above the water, so that the total height of its
snowy cap from the bed of the sea must be at least
42,100 feet, or 8 miles; that is, 2^ miles higher
than the highest of the Himalayas above the ocean
level.
117. On the heat of the ocean a great deal has
been revealed by the Challenger's expedition, and the
general result, exclusive of such special features as the
Gulf Stream, may be summed up as follows. In all
three oceans, within the Torrid and Temperate Zones,
the bottom of the sea is covered, as a rule, with a stratum
2,000 to 3,000 feet thick of cold water, varying from
freezing-point to 3 degrees above it (320 to 35?
Fahr.). In the Pacific this stratum lies at about 9,000
feet below the surface, and there is a line, at 2,500 or
78 GEOGRAPHY.
3,000 feet from the surface, below which the water is
almost uniformly 400. Both in the Pacific and Indian
Oceans it appears to be proved that this cold bottom
stratum comes from the Antarctic Pole. And even in
the Atlantic, so much more open to the north than
either of the others, the Antarctic water forces its way
along the ground beyond the Equator. North of the
Equator the bed of the central Atlantic becomes slightly
warmer, but it is not till the north of Scotland is passed
that the bottom cold stratum appears to be supplied
from the North Pole. The heat of the surface varies
with the latitude and the time of year. In the enclosed
sea of the Indian Archipelago, in January, February,
and March, 1875, it varied from 750 to 840 Fahr., with
an average of 817°.
118. In the Temperate and Torrid Zones at the
depth of 12 or 14,000 feet the bottom appears to be
generally covered with mud consisting of the shells
or skeletons of very small creatures (globigerina),
similar to those by which the chalk of our cliffs and
downs has been formed. In the deeper valleys the
bottom is a red clay with no remains of organisms..
In the Polar regions the mud of the bottom appears
to be pure flint.
119. Now this immense addition to our scientific
knowledge, to what is it due ? To Commerce. It is
Commerce which has called in Science and given it
this splendid opportunity of enriching itself. For the
depths of the ocean would never have been sounded
as they have been, and so many valuable and pregnant
facts extracted from them, if it had not been necessary
for business purposes to find the best line across the
bottom for the Atlantic electric cable. So let no one
depreciate commerce, or call it ignoble or sordid !
THE SALT WATER. 79
120. The water in the sea is salt throughout. It
is rather heavier than fresh water, its specific gravity
being 1*026; that is to say, a gallon of sea water
instead of weighing 10 lb. as a gallon of fresh water
does, would weigh 10*26 or a trifle over ioj^ lb. In
the Baltic, where so many rivers flow in, and about
the Equator where there is so much rain, it is much
less salt, and therefore lighter. In the Mediterranean,
on the other hand, where a great deal of evaporation
goes on, and the sea is enclosed, it becomes Salter and
heavier. The rivers and streams are always at work
wearing down the land, and carrying the fragments of
its mountains and continents into the sea; and the sea
in like manner is always employed in washing over and
over the materials thus brought into it. And as this
has been going on for millions of years, the sea water
must contain all the substances which once formed those
materials and can be dissolved in cold water— in other
words, every soluble substance in nature. This is why
the sea is salt. The chief ingredient in it is common
salt, and salts of magnesia and lime are also plentiful.
A very small trace of silver is also found, and it gives
a startling idea of the vastness of the ocean to know
that this minute, hardly perceptible quantity, if it could
be all collected, would yield two million tons of that
metal, equal in value to ^£13,440,000,000, seventeen
times the National Debt.
FEATURES OF THE EARTH.
T21. I have now done my best to give you a general
idea of the shape, situation, and character of the
dry land of the earth, and of the most striking
peculiarities of the ocean. We will end by going
through what may be called the principal features of
80 GEOGRAPHY.
the face of the earth, its mountains and rivers, capes,
isthmuses, promontories, and other portions of its
surface, and seeing what hints we can gain from such
an examination of them.
122. A continent is the mainland of the world, as
distinguished from islands which though large are still
evidently surrounded by the sea. Australia, though
an island, is so much larger than other islands, that it
too is called a continent. Indeed, it is within one
seventh part as large as Europe itself. — Living as we
do in an island, we often speak of the mainland of
Europe as " the continent," and of" continental trade,"
" continental customs," a " continental tour," &c.
123. Strictly speaking the whole of the Old World
is one continent. Africa is cut off from Asia by the
Red Sea and the Suez Canal, though the interval is a
very narrow one, but the division between Europe and
Asia is purely artificial. Nevertheless, the distinction
between the continents has been so long recognised,
and is grounded on so real a difference in the nature
of the three, that Europe, Asia, Africa, and America
will probably be called the four quarters of the
globe as long as the world lasts. (§86.)
124. The word continental is sometimes applied
to the drainage of the high central district of Asia,
and other regions in America which are shut out from
the ocean, and " contain " their own drainage, the
rivers running not into the sea but into inland lakes.
(§740
125. Island, land surrounded by water — set in
the water, as the eye is set in the face. The word is
not from isle, but from *ey, as in Anglesey, Selsey,
*£y = island. The spelling ea, as in Anglesea, Chelsea, Portsea, is wrong.
ISLANDS. 8 1
Orkney ; or oe, as in Faroe ; and we still use it in
eyot or ait for the island near Chiswick and other
islands in the Thames. The world has been some-
times said to consist of two large islands, Europe,
Asia, and Africa in one, and America in the other,
as each is completely surrounded by water ; but these
large masses of land are always called continents. So
is Australia. The largest island is Borneo, and the
next New Guinea. Great Britain ranks seventh in
the scale. One of the smallest inhabited ones is
perhaps Heligoland, which, though but a third of
the size of Hyde Park, and boasting only a single tree,
contains 2,800 inhabitants.
126. Islands are the tops of mountains rising from
the bottom of the sea, in many cases very high moun-
tains. Bermuda rises from a depth of 15,000 feet, with
no other known eminence on either side nearer than
600 miles, much as if Mont Blanc were planted quite
alone in the middle of Russia. The Antilles, or
small islands of the West Indies, rise from ground
which in many places is from 15,000 to 20,000 feet
below the water, and as they stand from 3,000 to
6,000 feet above it must represent a truly magnifi-
cent chain of mountains. The Azores are a group
of from 10,000 to 16,000 feet high, standing upon a
plateau of about 700 miles in diameter, itself rising to
a height of more than 6,000 feet above the general
level of the ocean bed. This would make the height
of the Pico (which is 7,613 feet above the ocean)
fully 22,000 feet in all above the great valley of the
Atlantic bed, and the others in proportion.
127. The Canaries would form a splendid outpost to
Africa. If the sea were to retire, the three islands of
Teneriffe, Palma, and the Gran Canada would appear
82 GEOGRAPHY.
as peaks towering to the heights of 23,000, 19,000,
and 18,000 feet above their bases. In the Pacific the
Ladrone islands appear to rise suddenly to a height
above the ocean bed of between 27 and 28,000 feet ;
while Japan and the Kurile islands to the N.E. of it
must be even yet more lofty.
128. The great islands of Borneo, New Guinea,
and others which lie between Australia and Asia were
probably at one time a continuous continent, lying
to the south of Asia, much as South America does
with respect to North America.
129. The coral islands, with few exceptions, are
only to be found between latitudes 30° N. and 300 S.
of the Equator, and oftenest in the Pacific Ocean;
they appear to be formed on the tops of submarine
eminences, which are gradually sinking with the bed
of the sea. This opinion (Mr. Darwin's) is grounded
on the fact that the creatures which make the coral
can only work between the surface and a certain depth
(90 to 150 feet) ; and as the coral goes down much be-
yond that depth, it is inferred that the islands have
been gradually sinking so as to allow the animals to
keep adding to the top, as they are still doing. The
coral usually forms a round ring from one to thirty
miles diameter, and a quarter of a mile or so in width,
enclosing a lagoon of water with one doorway to the
ocean, on the leeward side. On the ring earth
gradually collects, and palm-trees grow. Outside, all
is noise and fury, the waves of the ocean breaking on
the coral in tremendous surf; inside, the water is
perfectly still and clear. These islands are called
" atolls."
130. When coral comes near the surface, but not
ARCHIPELAGO. CAPE. 83
above, it is called a reef. The largest of these is the
Great Barrier reef, off Queensland, on the N.E. coast
of Australia, a natural breakwater 1,000 miles long,
which protects the coast from a terrible sea, and
leaves a calm still channel for ships within it.
131. Archipelago is a word used for a collection
of islands, at first for those in the ^Egean Sea, between
Greece and Asia Minor, and afterwards for various
other groups, such as the Malay Archipelago, Borneo,
Java, Sumatra, and the rest ; the Low or Dangerous
Archipelago in the South Pacific, and the Chagos
Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. In the two last
cases the groups consist partly of reefs and half-
formed islands.
132. Cape— that is, head — a part of the coast run-
ning out into the sea, usually a bold headland, the
end of a mountain, sometimes called a promontory.
Such, though not called capes, are Beachy Head,
Flamborough Head, and St. David's Head ; and such,
but much larger, is the Cape of Good Hope, which
is the end of the high plateau of South Africa. Other
famous capes are Cape Farewell, at the south point
of Greenland j North Cape (an island), the extreme
north of Europe ; Cape de Verde, the west cape of
Africa ; St. Vincent, on the coast of Portugal ; Finis-
terre, and Trafalgar, on that of Spain. Cape Horn,
the southern extremity of South America, is an island,
one of the group off the mainland which forms the
Tierra del Fuego.
133. Where the point of land is low, it is often
called ness — that is, a nose ; as Dungeness, which
contrasts well with Beachy Head ; and on the low
coasts of Kent, Essex, and Suffolk we find Sheerness,
84 GEOGRAPHY.
Shoeburyness, Foulness, and Orfordness, and even
The Naze. The name came from the Danes or the
Northmen. It is found on the coast of Norway,
and on that of Scotland, which they frequented, as
naes or noss; also at Grisnez, opposite Dungeness.
On the south coast of England the word bill is
similarly used, as Selsey Bill, Portland Bill. Other
words used for headlands in Scotland are mull and
butt.
134. Mountains are the largest eminences of a
country, and hills the smaller ones — as we say the
" Welsh mountains," and the " Surrey hills." But this
distinction is not always kept up. The " Mount of
Olives " is a moderate-sized hill, and the " Neilgherry
Hills " are mountains more than 8,000 feet high. In
India, again, the " Hill States " are territories high up
in the northern mountains, and " going to the hills "
means migrating for the hot season to Simla or Murree,
which lie thousands of feet up on the spurs of the
Himalayas. Sometimes, too, a collection of moun-
tains is called a " mount," as Mount Lebanon, which
is really a range 50 miles long and, in some places,
12,000 feet high.
135. Mountains may be single and independent, like
Etna or Vesuvius, and then they are generally vol-
canoes. Or they may be connected in one long
range, or chain, or cordillera, like the Pyrenees, or the
Apennines, and the Caucasus ; or in a double chain
of two parallel main ridges, or even more, each
perhaps a hundred miles apart, with great valleys
and table-lands and smaller mountains between
them, like the Northern Andes and the Rocky
mountains, between the ranges of which lie great
countries like Mexico, and Peru, and Oregon ; or
MOUNTAINS. 8g
like the Himalayas and Kuen-luns, which are 600
miles from each other, and have between them the
whole region of Tibet. Or they may be collected
KUENLUNS
Fig. 20.
together with no very obvious arrangement ; like the
Alps, which include the groups of the Oberland, Mont
Blanc, Monte Rosa, the Grisons, and the Tyrol.
136. The highest mountains in the world are the
Himalayas, where there are four peaks rising to
29,002, 28,265, 28,156, and 26,826 feet, and many
others nearly as high. In the Andes there are seven
mountains which vary from 25,250 to 15,931 feet.
Mont Blanc is 15,784; Ben Nevis, 4,406; Snowdon,
3,590 feet. It must be remembered that these heights
are all measured above the sea ; whereas the moun-
tains are often planted inland, on considerably higher
ground ; for instance, the height of the valley of Cha-
mouni, at the foot of Mont Blanc, is 3,500 feet, which
thus takes nearly three-quarters of a mile off the
nominal height of the mountain. But, as we said
86 GEOGRAPHY.
before, even at the best how small are such heights
when compared with the earth's diameter. They are
no more than the heads of the nails which fasten
the lead to the dome of St. Paul's ; and if you were
on the moon looking at the earth, they would make
no difference whatever in the roundness of the globe.
137. The appearance of a mountain is often decep-
tive. The height and slope appear greater than
they are ; the rise of the mountain is full in view, and
your own height gives you a vertical measure of it,
whereas you have no means of estimating the distance
of the slope from you, or the rate at which it slants
away, and is lost in the distance. Few mountains rise
at a steeper angle than 450, and most are much less.
The Peak of Teneriffe, which, from the harbour, seems
to be almost over your head, is said to slope only
at an angle of 120 30'. (§67.) You read in books of
" vertical heights/' and of mountains " overhanging "
a town or a valley. These words may convey the
appearance of the spot correctly, and the effect on the
mind of the writer; but they are quite inaccurate
as to fact. The mountains round Innspruck, when
viewed from the town itself, seem almost to overhang
the streets, and enclose it like the sides of a deep cup ;
but they are really many miles distant, and their
slope is but gradual.
138. The crest or ridge of a mountain is the
general line of its range, above which the principal
peaks project. Thus the general or mean height of
the Pyrenees is about 8,000 feet, though some of its
summits rise to more than 11,000. Sierra — a saw —
is a word which the Spaniards apply to a range of
mountains, such as the Sierra Nevada, the Sierra
Sagra, &c, in Spain, Mexico, and South America.
PASSES. 87
139. Passes are notches in the crest of a moun-
tain by which it is easiest to cross from one side to the
other ; the roads of the Stelvio, Simplon, and Splugen,
by which we cross the Alps between Switzerland and
Italy, are examples. Other passes are too precipitous
for carriage or horse, and must be crossed on foot;
such are the S. Theodule, Col de Ge'ant, &c. The
Khyber and Bolan passes, between Hindostan and
Afghanistan, were the scenes of some of the great
disasters of our army in 1841-42. Some of the passes
in the Himalayas by which the merchants go from
India to Kashgar, Ladak, or Tibet, are as much as
18,000 feet high above the sea; that is they have
to climb that height, before they can find a gap allow-
ing them to cross from the south to the north side of
the mountains.
140. The heat of the air becomes less as we ascend
a mountain, and at last it grows so cold that the snow
remains there always. The height at which this takes
place varies with the part of the earth we are in,
and with other things ; as, for instance, whether the
mountain faces south or north, whether it is steep or
not, whether it is exposed to cold winds or warm
winds. In the Andes, between the tropics, the
snow-line varies from 15,000 to 20,000 feet above
the sea, according to circumstances. On the Hima-
layas it is 15,500 feet on the south side and 16,600
on the north side ; on Mont Blanc it is 8,500 feet.
Warm winds contain a great deal of moisture, and
when such a wind blows on to a cold mountain it drops
its moisture ; in other words rain falls. And this is the
reason why there is so much rain in mountainous
districts. The heaviest annual rainfall in the world
is in the Khasia hills, behind the Bay of Bengal,
GEOGRAPHY.
where the hot damp winds from the Indian Ocean
meet a cooler atmosphere, and drop not less than
50 feet deep of water in the twelve months. In the
Cumberland mountains the rainfall is from 15 to
18 feet annually, while away from the mountains on
the same coast it is only from 2 feet 6 inches to 4 feet.
Sometimes mountains intercept the whole of the rain,
as the Andes do. An immense quantity falls on their
eastern or Atlantic side, while on the coast between
the Andes and the Pacific it is very seldom seen. In
the district between the Rocky mountains and the
Cascade mountains, the former intercept the rain
from the Atlantic, and the latter that from the Pacific,
and the land receives none.
141. By thus intercepting the moisture of the air
mountains cause great differences in the climate of
places on opposite sides of them. Thus with the
Dovrefeld, the great mountain range of Norway, on
the west or seaward side the difference between the
temperatures of summer and winter is only 180, while
on the other side of the range, by the Gulf of Bothnia,
the difference is 42 ° ; the summer being much hotter,
the winter much colder.
142. If the mountains are not covered with perpetual
snow, the rain that falls and does not sink into the
ground runs off in torrents and streams and water-
falls. If they are colder it falls as snow, and then
forms glaciers, which may be described as rivers
of ice, filling the upper valleys many hundred feet
deep, and slowly forcing their way down into the
lower parts. As they get lower, into the warmer
air, the glaciers melt, and from the lower end — ■
sometimes called the " toe " — a river will flow away,
as the Arve does from the lower end of the Mer de
MOUNTAINS. GLACIERS.
Glace, or the Rhone from the glacier below the
Furca. Thus glaciers so far perform the same office
as lakes (§ 192) ; they receive the sudden masses
of snow, store them up, and release them gradually
in the form of streams, always flowing to refresh and
fertilise the valleys below, and to delight the eye by
the continual contrast of the verdure beneath with the
rocks and snow above.
143. We in Europe can form little idea of what a
frightful calamity the want of mountains and streams
is. Australia will probably suffer from it to the end
of time. Had that great continent been divided by a
range of mountains, sufficiently lofty to have had per-
petual snow, and thus to intercept the hot winds and
rob them of their moisture, it would have been one.
of the richest countries in the world ; and its interior,
instead of being, as much of it is, a wilderness of
countless sand ridges, itself devoured by scorching
winds, and the source of drought and oppression to
the settlements on the coast, would have been one
giant field of corn and pasture.
144. But from whatever source it started, the river
carries away sand and stones, which the rain or the
glacier have soaked or scraped off the mountain ; and
thus the circle of nature goes on. The mountain causes
the clouds to drop their rain : the rain wears away the
mountain and hurries down its sides, gradually raising
the lowlands with what it brings down, and carrying
the remainder into the ocean, from whence, while the
sand goes into the depths to form new rocks, the
water rises again in vapour, to repeat, over and over
again, the same process of destruction and supply.
145. Mountains have played a great part in the
history of many countries by affording a refuge for the
po GEOGRAPHY.
people when the lowlands were conquered, and pre-
serving for long the names, manners, and customs of the
first inhabitants of the country. The Peak of Derbyshire,
and the Cumberland mountains, contain more names
in the Celtic or old British dialect than the lowland
districts round them do ; Wales and the Highlands of
Scotland are still inhabited by the old British peoples
whom the English could not drive out as they did
those of the flatter parts of Britain. In Switzerland,
the Caucasus, and Southern India, the mountains are
still the abode of the primeval races — and the same
elsewhere. There, far away from cities and com-
munication with the rest of the world, they preserve
the simple virtues of primeval life, though they also
preserve its ignorance and prejudice. In Kaferistan,
a very inaccessible mountain-region of Central Asia, on
the southern slopes of the Hindoo Koosh, all attempts
at intercourse with the ancient people have been un-
successful, so that, though a large and prosperous
nation, their numbers, language, and creed remain to
this day unknown.
146. This has occasionally been reversed, as in the
conquest of Palestine, where the Jews took possession
of the heights, and left the plains to the Canaanites ;
and in some parts of Italy to the present day the villages
adhere to the mountain side, and for the same reason,
namely, that the plains were the resort of robbers and
plunderers, from whom safety was only to be found
in the hills. Both cases shew the influence which
mountains have had on the life of the nations who
dwell among them.
147. Nor should we forget the protection which a
chain of mountains affords to those who dwell behind
them. But for the Alps, Italy would no doubt have been
MOUNTAINS AND THEIR NAMES. 91
overrun by the northern barbarians centuries sooner
than it was ; Napoleon could not have invaded it but
for the road across the Great St. Bernard, and the
fact of his making the Simplon road afterwards, at an
immense cost, proves how great an obstacle he felt the
mountains to be to his movements. Thus mountains,
and not rivers, are the usual boundaries of different
countries. The Cheviots form more than two-thirds
of the barrier between England and Scotland. The
Franco-German war of 1870 showed that the Vosges
mountains, and not the Rhine, were the real division
between France*and Germany. The Pyrenees and Alps
are obvious instances of the same thing.
148. In many cases mountains take their names
from the snow on their tops. Himalaya is the "abode
of snow;" Dwajalagiri is "the white mountain;"
Lebanon the same ; Apennines means " the white
head ; " Caucasus is " white with snow." Mont Blanc,
the Sierra Nevada, the Weisshorn, the Snafell in
Iceland, the Sneehattan in Norway, are all names
derived from the snow. But this is not always
the case, even where we should most expect it.
Andes means " copper ; " Fusi-yama, the snow-capt
mountain of Japan, is " the mountain of the rich
men ;" Pyrenees is " high ;" Aghir-dagh (Ararat) is the
"huge mountain." Ural is a "belt or girdle;" Alp
is probably a height; Hecla, "a cloak," is so called
from the smoke which hangs over it ; Table mountain
from its flat shape ; Etna means a furnace in
Phoenician, but it is now usually called Mon-gibello —
r mountain-mountain," or " the mountain " — by the
peasants of Sicily.
149. Other mountains are called after their dis-
coverers or explorers, or other eminent persons,
GEOGRAPHY.
as the Owen Stanley range in New Guinea; Mount
pA-erest, and Webb's Peaks in the Himalayas ; Mount
Murchison, and Fremont Peak, in the Rocky moun-
tains. The great volcanoes in South Victoria Land
are called Erebus and Terror, after the two ships of
Captain James Ross who discovered them. Some
great mountains seem destined to be known for ever
by a mere surveyor's number. The second loftiest
peak in the Himalayas appears in the map as " K 2."
150. In speaking of a mountain it is curious to
notice how it is treated as a person. Mont Blanc
has been called the " monarch of mountains j " the
Jungfrau means the " virgin f in Cumberland we have
k! the Old Man," which answers exactly to Jebel-esh-
Sheikh, the modern name for Mount Hermon. And
not only so, but the names for the different parts of a
mountain are mostly taken from the human body, such
as the head, crown, shoulder, breast, gorge (i.e. throat),
side, back, flanks, foot, instep, and heel, and in French
col (neck), for a pass. We even speak of the " saddle"
and the "spurs," and when a line of mountains runs
from end to end of an island, as the Blue mountains in
Jamaica, they are appropriately named its " backbone."
151. I have mentioned volcanoes or burning'
mountains. There is great difference of opinion as
to their number. Some say that there are 400 in all,
others that there are no less than 900 in the islands of
the West Pacific alone. Many of them seem to have
altogether ceased to burn, but others are in constant
eruption. A volcano is a hole going down below the
surface and through the crust of the earth, up which
melted lava or red-hot cinders and dust are blown
from underneath. The quantity thus thrown out is
sometimes almost beyond belief. At Tomboro, a
BURNING MOUNTAINS. 93
burning mountain in Sumbawa, in 1815, cinders and
dust enough were thrown out to form three moun-
tains equal to Mont Blanc, or to cover the whole
of England and Scotland to a depth of 7 feet. In
1783, lava was forced out of a volcano in Iceland,
equal to 21 cubic miles. In 1835 there was an erup-
tion in Mexico, the ashes of which covered the ground
for more than 20 miles round the mountain to a depth
of 10 feet, and were carried as far as Jamaica, fully
1,000 miles off.
152. You can understand that as the stones and dust
and ashes are blown out of the hole they will form a
heap round about it. This heap is called the cone, and
the hole itself goes down like a funnel through the
cone and is called the crater. Besides the main crater
others break out and vomit forth stones and dust and
cinders and lava j and lava will burst out of the side
of the mountain and flow like a small river of melting
iron, though the surface soon cools and gets thick,
and then runs very slowly and forms huge ugly lumps.
A field of lava after the lava is cold is one of the
most hideous sights in the world. Thus by degrees a
mountain is formed round the crater. Etna is nearly
11,000 feet high, and 87 miles round the base, and
was probably all formed in the way described. Some-
times, as at Ternate and Tidore, in the Moluccas,
which are regular symmetrical cones of from 5 to
6,000 feet high, the volcano appears to have risen to
its present height by the outpouring of the single
crater.
153. These particulars rather belong to geology than
geography, and you will find full information upon
them in the Primer of Physical Geography (p. 103);
but there are some things about volcanoes which must
94 GEOGRAPHY.
be noticed here. One is that they are seldom or never
far away from water. Etna, Vesuvius, and Hecla are
all close to the coast. The volcanoes of the Andes
line the eastern shore of the Pacific for several
thousand miles ; and from North America through the
Aleutian and Kurile islands, Japan, the Philippines
and Java, to New Zealand, volcanoes may be said
almost to enclose that ocean.
154. Another point is that they often occur in
straight lines, as if over a crack or weak place in the
earth's cruet. In the Aleutian islands there are 23,
covering 900 miles in length. In Kamschatka and the
Kurile islands they extend 540 miles in a line, in the
Ladrones 420, and in the Sundas for nearly 1,000.
But as each volcanic mountain is, from the way in
which it is formed, independent — each collected around
its own crater or craters, and formed by the heaping
together of the materials thrown out of the crater — ■
volcanoes are, as a rule, different in shape from
mountains of upheaval.
155. Old lava broken up and worn down by the
action of the weather forms a peculiarly rich soil. On
the slopes of Vesuvius grow the grapes from which the
famous wine called Lacrima Christi is made. Madeira
is a mass of disintegrated volcanic rock, and the
plain of Gennesareth, at the N.W. corner of the Lake
of Galilee, one of the richest little spots in the world,
derives its fertile soil from the wearing down of the
basalt of an old volcano just above it.
156. Valleys are the natural opposites to mountains.
A valley is the trench or hollow through which a river
flows — as the valley of the Thames, the valley of the
Nile, the valley of the Rhone, the vale of Clwydd ;
meaning the whole extent between the heights on the
VALLEYS. PLAINS. 95
one side of the river and the heights on the other.
Thus it expresses something like what is meant by
the more exact word basin (§ 200), though the basin
takes in all the sources and feeders of the river, up
to the very farthest and smallest, whereas the valley
relates to the stream alone. The valley must have
begun in some accidental hollow in the ground, which
attracted the water to flow along it, and which has
been gradually deepened and widened by the flow.
Though originally formed in this way it is not
necessary that the river should still be there ; many
causes may have altered its course or lessened its
flow. Sometimes the bed of the valley will be occu-
pied by a series of lakes.
157. A plain is a district of more or less even
ground, not broken up by mountains or hills. It may
have undulations of its own, and may rise by degrees
to a considerable height, but it will do so by long,
easy slopes. Thus Salisbury Plain is a succession of
hollows and rises, over which the road goes gently up
and down. Some plains are alluvial — that is, have
been deposited by water — and these are almost abso-
lutely level. Such are parts of the counties of Cam-
bridge, Norfolk, and Lincoln ; and such are the
plain of Crau, between Aries and Marseilles — which
is the older part of the Delta of the Rhone j or the
whole of Lower Egypt, which is the Delta of the
Nile; or, on a larger scale, the Steppes of South
Russia, and the plains of Western or Lower Turkestan,
at one time the bed of an ocean of which the Caspian
and Aral Seas are traces.
158. When a plain is some height above the sea-
level, it is called a plateau or table-land.
159. The greatest plain in the world is that which
96 GEOGRAPHY.
has been already (§72) described as spreading over
the northern part of Europe and Asia, from Cam-
bridgeshire to the eastern end of Siberia. On the
European side its mean height above the sea-level
is about 500 feet, on the Asiatic side rather more.
Each portion is distinguished for its rivers ; those
in Europe drain partly into the Baltic and partly
into the Black Sea, and the mighty Volga itself dis-
charges i-7th of all the water of Europe into the
Caspian. The rivers of the Siberian plain are far
larger even than the Volga, and they all discharge
into the Arctic Ocean ; the table-land of Central Asia
preventing all drainage to the southward. The
Steppes of Europe are the country about the lower
part of the Dnieper, the Don, and the Volga, a level
district about 200 feet above the sea. East of the
Volga the land falls below the sea-level, and these
are the lower steppes.
160. The Altai mountains, and their continuation
eastward, which shut in Siberia on the south, are
the beginning of the mass of high land which ends
in the range of the Himalayas. The country rises
southwards by successive terraces : first the plateau
of Mongolia and the sandy desert of Gobi, forming
together a district of from 1,200 to 1,800 miles
from west to east, and 600 broad from north to
south, and from 2,500 to 3,000 feet in general
height. Then come the Kuen-lun mountains, forming
the buttresses to another step upwards, to the very
lofty plateau of Tibet, 700 miles long by 350 wide,
and 15 to 17,000 feet high. This is absolutely shut
out from all communication with the ocean, and its
rivers, though large, all flow into lakes, with no outlet
but that of evaporation. South of Tibet are the
PLATEAUS AND PLAINS. 97
Gangri mountains, dividing it from the valley of the
upper Brahmapootra, over which towers the double
range of the Himalayas, with a general height of
18,000 feet, and peaks which reach 29,000.
161. The Lowland plains of S. America lie between
the Andes and the Atlantic, and form 7-8ths of the
whole of the South continent. They are known by the
names of the Llanos, or Savannahs, in the north, and
the Pampas in the south. The Selvas are a forest
district in the basin of the Amazons. These plains
are flooded every year by the great rivers which flow
through them.
162. The interior of North America, between the
Rocky mountains on the west and the Alleghanies on
the east, is an immense plain, sloping up very gradually
from the Gulf of Mexico to a summit of about 1,500
feet in height. The northern slopes of this summit
drain into the Saskatchewan and Red rivers, the
southern into the Missouri and Mississippi ; and
north-east of it is the great chain of fresh-water lakes
which discharge through the St. Lawrence into tha
Atlantic. The northern and eastern portions of
the great plain, some 1,400 by 1,000 miles, are the
prairies, undulating regions covered with coarse
grass.
163. The Sahara, or burning desert of North Africa,
is 3,000 miles long from the Atlantic to Egypt, and
over 1,000 in width, equal in area to the whole of
Australia, and varying in height from below the sea to
1,500 feet above it. The extreme east end of the
Sahara is the land of Egypt, where the sand is ferti-
lised by the annual inundation of the Nile.
164. The Dasht-i-kavir of Northern Persia is a
desert of salt swamps which appears to cover a space
D
98 GEOGRAPHY.
of 6 degrees of longitude by 2 of latitude ; but it is
so little known that I am only able to mention it.
165. Peninsula, a country or piece of land not
quite an island — not quite surrounded by the sea;
such as the Morea or the Crimea, each of which is a
perfect example. If South America were smaller, it
too would be a perfect peninsula, hanging on as it
does from North America by the little shred of
Panama (fig. 15); and so would Africa, which is
connected to Asia only by the narrow neck of Suez.
Indeed, since the Suez Canal was made, Africa is
practically an island. But these great lands are con-
tinents, and it would be disrespectful to apply the
term peninsula to either of them.
166. Where there is a peninsula there ought to be
an isthmus, which is the neck of land connecting it
with the mainland; and the best examples of this
are the Isthmus of Darien or Panama ; that at Perekop
at the head of the Crimea ; and the Isthmus of
Corinth, which connects the Morea with Greece.
This last was "the Isthmus" with the Greeks, and
gave its name to the Isthmian games, which were
played there.
167. The peninsula with which we are all most
familiar is that of Spain and Portugal, where the Penin-
sular war was fought. In fact, in the mouths of many
people, " the Peninsula " means these two countries.
We also hear the expression the Peninsula of India;
but the word is incorrect in both cases, since the
part where Spain joins France is more than 200 miles
wide, and the broadest part of India is where it joins
the continent — that is, where the neck of the isthmus
ought to be.
168. With the Greeks a chersonesus was the same
PENINSULA. RIVERS. 99
thing as a peninsula with us. They called the Morea
the Peloponnesus (the island of Pelops), the Crimea
the Tauric Chersonese, and the peninsula of Malacca
the Golden Chersonese.
169. A river is the largest kind of stream, always
flowing, never dry. Small streams are rivulets or
brooks. A torrent is a stream which flows only
in the winter or rainy season, and in summer is dry
or much reduced, leaving a wide empty bed of
stones and sand, with a small stream in the middle.
In Italy this is called fiumara, in India nullah, in
Syria wady. In Spain, wady, an Arabic word, has
become corrupted into guad, as in Guad-alquivir,
Guad-arama, &c. In North America and Australia
the word creek is used for a river of secondary size,
whether permanent, or dry in summer. But a creek
(that is, crack) is correctly an opening in the shore
narrower than a gulf. (§204.)
170. When you stand by a great, strong rush-
ing river, like the Rhine at Basle or the Thames at
Battersea Bridge, it is hard to believe that all that
mass of water is made up of separate rills and drops,
gathered one by one from the land the river passes
through. And it is harder still not to imagine that if
you wait long enough it must pass away before your
eyes, and leave the bed dry. It seems impossible
that so much water can go flowing on for long. But in
both cases you are wrong. The Rhine and the Thames
will live longer than you will, and they are made of
contributions from innumerable sources.
171. Rivers are the drains of a country. The
water falls from the sky in rain or snow, and will
naturally drain off by the lowest levels till it reaches
the lowest of all, the sea. As it goes along, one drain
GEOGRAPHY.
joins another, until at last they all get united into one
large main drain, and this we call the river. This is
easy to understand where the country consists of
mountains and slopes, but the same thing happens
where it is so flat that, to the eye, there appears no
slope at all ; the water will always find out the lowest
level, and along that it will travel, unless it be a hole,
and then it stays there and forms a lake.
1 7 2. A river may have its source — that is, its longest
branch may begin — in a spring, like the Jordan ;
or a lake like the St. Lawrence, the Amazons, and
probably the Nile ; or a glacier like the Rhone ;
but it is not the source which makes a river large,
it is the number of other rivers and streams which
flow into it, and bring down the water of the
various basins which they themselves have drained.
A river which runs into another is called an affluent
or tributary, and the place at which they join is the
confluence. A river does not usually grow broader
after it is joined by a tributary, but it runs faster,
and therefore is able to carry along the extra load of
earth and stones which the tributary brings into it. For
we must remember that one great office of rivers is to
bring down the materials of the highlands to the low-
lands and into the sea, and thus continually to renew
the face of the earth. The Nile, for instance, every
summer spreads a layer of rich mud over the fields
of Egypt, which is as good as a coat of manure.
173. A river which gets much of its water from
mountains has a small basin, is very rapid in its
flow, subject to frequent sudden floods, deep in
winter, shallow in summer, boats cannot make way
against the stream, and little trade can be carried on
upon it. Thus the Rhone, which rises in the heart of
THE RHONE. THE MISSISSIPPI.
the Alps, is 504 miles long, and has six main tribu-
taries, its basin is 38,000 square miles, it descends
through 5,600 feet, it is the most rapid river in
Europe, perhaps in the world ; the stream is so strong
that its navigation can only be carried on by steam-
boats, and even that only below Lyons. The floods
are often terrific, and the number of people and
buildings destroyed by them is immense.
174. Now take a river of a different kind. The
Mississippi has more than a hundred affluents, of which
the Missouri is fully as big as itself, while several of
the others are mighty streams. The land drained by
the whole of these rivers, which at last collect in the
one channel of the Mississippi, is more than a million
of square miles, and chiefly flat land. The Mis-
souri gets much of its water from the Rocky moun-
tains, but the Mississippi itself and its other great
tributaries drain a country which slopes so gently
that at 2,400 miles' distance it is not quite 1,500
feet above the sea. But the current is very strong and
muddy, always running down, full of sunken trees
and very dangerous to boats, and the trees and timber
which it brings down so fill it up as in some places to
stop the passage almost entirely. The windings of
the Mississippi also are so great as to make some parts
of it double the length. The Volga, the largest river
of F.urope, 2,700 miles long, drains a surface of half a
million miles, for the most part so flat that the highest
land in all that space is but 1,100 feet above the
ocean. The Volga, too, is always running one way ;
its mouth is barred by sandbanks; and after all its
length and its many windings it ends, not in the open
sea but in the Caspian, a lake without any outlet.
175. By the side of these giants, the Thames is
GEOGRAPHY.
but a little river, only 210 miles long, with a dozen
small affluents ; and its whole basin but 6,160 square
miles. But on the other hand, partly by nature, and
partly by the care of man, its stream is full and even from
end to end, with no undue or vexatious meanderings ;
free from rapids, currents, or sandbanks ; its water clear
and pure except where we have spoilt it; navigable
over nearly the whole of its length ; always friendly
and serviceable. The frosts which in North America
and in many of the rivers of Europe imprison the
traffic and hold it dormant during many valuable
months, are all but unknown to the Thames. It
enters the ocean at a sheltered place, and above
all it is a tidal river. This keeps its mouth free
from bars and shoals. The current though full
is so gentle that the tide from the sea can over-
come it and force it back, and thus twice a day
the tidal water runs up beyond London, and twice a
day runs down again, so that ships, barges, and lighters
can float up or down without wind or other help.
This natural and spontaneous movement is one of the
things that have helped to make London the great
place for commerce that it is. Every ship or boat
that goes from the sea to Paris, Lyons, or Cologne,
has, on account of the downward speed of the river,
to be dragged there against the force of a constant
strong current, instead of being floated up or helped
by the natural tide, as it is here. Think of that when-
ever you see the Thames washing the quays of the
Embankment, and the barges floating up or down
with no expense but that of the steering oar.
176. The mouth of a river is where it ends, and
empties itself into the sea or a lake. When the river
comes from or through a soft or sandy country it brings
THE THAMES. DELTAS.
103
down mud in the water. As long as the water is running
fast the mud is carried along ; but when it meets the sea
and comes to rest at its mouth, the mud falls down
and forms a bed or bank between the river and the
sea, spreading out in the form of a fan. This is the
case where the Nile runs into the Mediterranean.
Fig. 2t.
1 77. The Greeks called the place delta after the name
of their letter a which is so called ; and since then all
river-mouths of that kind have been called deltas.
The point of the triangle, where the river originally-
entered the sea, is called the head of the delta. If
there is a tide at the mouth of the river it will wash
the mud away as fast as it is thrown down, and prevent
the delta from forming. And therefore the principal
deltas are in seas which have no tide, as at the mouths
of the Nile, the Po, and the Ebro in the Mediterranean,
104 GEOGRAPHY.
of the Volga in the Caspian, and of the Mississippi
in the Gulf of Mexico. This last covers more than
30,000 square miles — very nearly the area of Ireland —
and has its head 200 miles up the river. Holland is a
large delta of very ancient date formed at the mouths
of the Rhine and the Meuse ; and Holland and Lower
Egypt are good examples of the way in which land is
made out of the sea by the agency of a river.
178. It follows from what we have just said that the
mouths of tidal rivers — which are called estuaries —
are, like the Thames, as a rule free from bars or sand-
banks.
179. Where the fall of rivers is rapid, and they bring
down many stones or much mud in their water, they
gradually drop stones and sand as they go along, and
so the bed is continually raising itself. You may see
this in North Wales, where a mountain torrent will
often run on a kind of embankment of stones and
rocks, several feet above the fields it runs through.
But in Italy such rivers as the Po, the Ticino, and
the Dora Baltea have raised themselves many yards
above the country ; and in consequence, when their
waters are swelled by the melting of the snow on the
mountains or by much rain, and they overflow their
banks, they rush down into the country on each side,
and carry everything away. The quantity of sand
and sediment brought down by some rivers is enor-
mous. That of the Ganges is computed to be six
thousand million cubic feet in the year, which, if it
could be heaped up before us, would form a mass
equal in size to 600 St. Paul's Cathedrals ; and this
has been going on for thousands, perhaps millions, of
years. Picture to yourself the way in which the earth
must be wearing down under such influences.
THE FALL OF RLVERS. 105
180. The rivers of Great Britain, even in the wettest
seasons, keep to their own beds, but in India so great
is the rush of water from the mountains in the rainy-
season, that it is no uncommon thing for a river to
make a new bed for itself in the soft soil of the plains,
and to wander several miles away from its old course,
to the destruction of everything in its road. The
Indus is an old offender in this way.
181. The slope or fall is different in different
rivers, and in different parts of the same. A river like
the Rhine or the Rhone, which rises high up in the
mountains, falls very quickly in the upper part of its
course and more gently afterwards. As far down as
Basle the Rhine falls through a height of 4,000 feet in
230 miles, or 17 feet per mile. Between Basle and
Mayence (246 miles) it falls 555 feet, or 2^ feet per
mile. The slope of the Rhone between Geneva and
Lyons is 6 feet 9 inches per mile, and from Lyons to
the sea 2 feet 8}4 inches per mile. The Nile, in the
1,000 miles from Khartoum to Philse, falls through 784
feet, or about 9 inches per mile. Here the cataracts
cease, and for the rest of the distance to the Mediter-
ranean at Damietta, 600 miles, the fall is 354 feet, or
7 inches per mile. The Amazons, during the upper
3,000 miles of its course, falls 10,000 feet, or 3^3 feet
per mile ; during the last 400 miles it suddenly sub-
sides, and slopes only 40 feet, or 1 }( inch in a mile.
The Thames, from Chertsey to Teddington, slopes
17^ inches per mile, from Teddington to London
Bridge (17^ miles), 9 inches per mile, and from
London Bridge to the Nore (46 miles), 1 inch per
mile.
182. The speed of a river does not usually depend
on its slope so much as on its depth, or the body of
D*
lo6 GEOGRAPHY.
water it contains, and on the straightness of its course.
If there are many windings and the river is shallow,
the speed is much reduced by the friction of the water
against the sides and bottom. The average speed of
the Nile, Rhine, and Ganges in their lower portions is
said to be from three to four miles an hour; the
St. Lawrence, below Niagara, about three miles an
hour ; the Thames, from Battersea downwards, at low
tide — when the river is left to itself — from 3 to 3^4
miles per hour. We can form some idea of the vast
body of water which is poured out by the Mississippi
into the Mexican Gulf, when we know that notwith-
standing its gentle slope and very crooked course,
and the many hindrances of timber, &c, already men-
tioned, the force of the current is enough to hurl the
water out so violently that its mud discolours the sea
out of sight of land.
183. A river is rarely the boundary between two
nations. The large rivers we have spoken of run
through their own countries. The French wished to
make the Rhine the boundary between a part of
France and Germany, but the Vosges mountains are
the actual barrier. In fact a river is rather a ready
means of communication than a barrier.
184. You will often see the expression " right bank "
or " left bank " of a river. You are supposed to be at
the source, looking down the stream. Then the right
bank is to your right hand, and the left bank to your
left hand.
185. The names of rivers are so curious that it will
be well worth our while to bestow a few minutes upon
them. They are amongst the oldest names in the
world ; they pass through the oddest changes as the
NAMES OF RIVERS.
language of the country alters, but the old word re-
mains firm and fast at the bottom of the new form.
They are the memorials of the very earliest races,
surviving amidst the latest civilisation. As the old
British stones at Avebury linger among the cottages
of the modern village, so does the Celtic word for
water still sound in the name of 6Mord. After the
North American Indians are extinct their language
will survive for ever in the names of the Pdtomac
and Susquehanna rivers.
The principal river names in England are four.
They are Celtic words, of the language spoken in the
island before Romans or Englishmen came into it,
and still spoken in Wales and the Highlands; and
they mean simply " river " or " water."
1 86. Avon. — There are no less than fourteen rivers
with this name unchanged in Great Britain, and still
more have it in a modified form, as Evan, Inn, &c.
Afon is the Welsh word for river, and the Welsh speak
habitually of the " Afon so-and-so/' as we do of the
" River so-and-so."
187. Dwr (pronounced like poor). — There are three
rivers called exactly by this name, and many others
called Dore, Duir, Dover, Dura-water, Thur, Adur,
and other forms. Joined with the word gwyn, clear,
dur-givyn, the clear water, it appears as Denvent, of
which name there are four rivers in the north of
England, besides the Darwen and Derwen, and the
Lake of Derwentwater. It is easier to say Darent
than Denvent, and so Darent it has become in Kent,
and from Darent, Dart, or shortened in another way,
Trent. Trent used to be supposed to mean thirty,
from the Latin triginta, French trente ; and they said it
108 GEOGRAPHY.
was because the river had thirty *tributaries, thirty
monasteries on its banks, thirty kinds of fish ; but it
is nothing of the sort. So too Dart is often said to
mean that the stream is as swift as a dart ; but after
what I have said you will know better.
1 88. Uisge. — This means simply "water," and is pre-
served almost exactly in " whisky," which was called
at first the "water of life," like the French name
eau-de-vie for brandy. And this is the most curious
of all the river names for its changes. The nearest
to the old form are perhaps the Wisk in Yorkshire
and the Usk in Monmouthshire ; then comes Esk,
of which there are nine, then Exe, Ax, Ux, and
Ox — which has nothing to do with oxen, as the
heralds supposed who gave Oxford its coat-of-arms —
and Ose, at Oseney, the " island in the water " near
Oxford ; and then Use, Ouse, Ousel, Ouseburn. Ash,
and Wish or Wis — in Wisbeach — and the Wash. The
Isis is the same word, and the Tam-esis or Thames is
only, the "broad water," because in old days it ex-
tended from where London stands to the Sydenham
hills. On the whole there are not less than 50 streams
named from Uisge, besides a large number of places
and things. Phoenix Park, Dublin, strange as it seems,
is a mere English corruption of Fion-uisge, from a clear
spring there.
189. The fourth word is Don, which besides its own
form appears as Dun, Dean, Dane, Davon, Devon,
Tyne, Teign, Teyn, and so on.
These names are , not confined to England. And
we need only remember the Dordogne* the Adour,
* So Milton :
Or Trent, who, like some earth-born giant, spreads
His thirty arms along the indented i
NAMES OF RIVERS. LAKES. 109
the Douro; the Oxus, the Oise, the Iser, Osnaburg
(which is really Osnabruck) ; the Don and the Danube,
to see how widely spread they are.
190. A river is a drain for taking the water of a
country to the ocean, and a lake is a natural tank
for storing it up. Suppose a hollow place between two
mountains, or two parts of a mountain. Streams flow
down the slopes into it, and springs burst up in its
bed, and the water collects in the hollow and rises
till it finds a place where it can run away ; and that is
sometimes the source of a great river. Such is Der-
went Water, or Loch Tay, or the lake of Zurich, or
the Italian lakes, or the lake Sir-i-kol (now called
Victoria) 15,600 feet high, and the source of the Oxus,
In his high mountain cradle in Pamere.
Sometimes a river will flow in at one end and out at
the other, as the Rhone runs through the lake of
Geneva, and the Rhine through the lake of Constance,
or the Jordan through the lake of Galilee. Sometimes
a number of lakes will be connected together, as those
of North America. (§79.)
191. Lakes are mostly in mountainous countries,
such as Scotland, Cumberland, Switzerland, or Bavaria,
where there are often convenient hollows for them to
form in. Not so however the North American lakes
which abound in Western Canada and Rupert's Land,
and have flat shores, and seem to come from the extra-
ordinary wetness of the country ; nor the Sea of Aral ;
nor the great lakes of North Russia, Finland, and
South Sweden, which are probably the remains of the
water that once covered the whole of that low region,
as Whittleseymere, in the Fen country in Huntingdon,
is or was.
GEOGRAPHY.
192. It is a great advantage to a river to run through
a lake, because the lake regulates the flow of the water
which goes away from it, and keeps it steady. If
much rain falls in the mountains above, or the weather
becomes hot and the snow melts quickly, it will come
down into the upper part of the river in such sudden
floods that the channel is not big enough to carry it
off, and then it will overflow and wash away houses
and fields and cattle, or, like the Indian rivers (§180),
it will change its bed. But if there is a lake this is
prevented, because the flood of water which was
enough to fill the river to overflowing is only sufficient
to make the lake rise a few inches or a few feet, and
then the water gets time to flow away more quietly
down the lower part of the river.
193. Lakes through which water flows are fresh.
But sometimes the hollow in which the water collects
is lower than the ocean, or so parted from it that there
can be no outlet ; in this case, the only escape for the
water is by evaporation. The streams and the springs
pour in to the lake, the sun heats the water and turns
it into vapour, and the level at which the water
stands is the balance of the two. This is the case in
the Dead Sea. The water is continually being dis-
tilled by the sun, that is to say the pure water is
driven off in vapour, and the salts and other in-
gredients remain behind in the lake. It is easy to
see that the quantity of salts in the water must be
continually increasing, while the quantity of water
remains the same; so that the saltness must go on
becoming more and more intense, till, as in the Dead
Sea, the water is too bitter and hot to be borne in the
mouth, or, as in lake Assal, in Eastern Africa, it is
almost solid salt.
LAKES. INLAND SEAS.
194. The Caspian and Aral are the largest of a great
number of lakes, which receive the drainage of the
central district of Asia — the so-called " continental
district " already mentioned. Similar inland lakes are
those of Titicaca in Bolivia, in the bosom of the
Andes j lake Chad in the Sahara j and the Great
Salt Lake in Utah, North America.
195. Lakes in Scotland are called loch, and in
Ireland lough — both pronounced alike. A tarn is
a small lake, usually high up in the mountains.
196. Inland seas are portions of the ocean,
separated from it by a very narrow entrance. Such
are the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and Hudson's Bay ;
but the most important are the Baltic and the Medi-
terranean (which means " in the midst of land "), in-
cluding the Black Sea. These two receive between
them more than half the waters of Europe. They
have little or no tide, as their narrow entrances keep
it out. They are, however, in some respects very
different. The Baltic is shallow, the Mediterranean
deep; the Baltic is diluted by its many rivers, and
its water is not so salt as the ocean ; while the
Mediterranean, not receiving nearly so many rivers in
proportion, and having a hot climate to evaporate
the water, is salter than the ocean. The Mediterranean
is agreeable, the Baltic inclement, both are treacherous.
In each there is a constant current both out and
in, but in the Mediterranean the outward current is
below, and the inward one above ; while in the Baltic
it is exactly the reverse — the outgoing current is
above, and the incoming one below. These two seas
add enormously to the coast-line of Europe, and help
to give it that great length which is one of the causes
of its superiority to other parts of the world,
GEOGRAPHY.
197. Watershed and waterparting are two
words belonging to the supply of water to rivers.
A waterparting is the spot or line at which the
surface-water of a mountain, hill, or swelling ground
parts, and begins to flow down the slope on each side.
The ridge of a roof is a waterparting. It is the
line between the rain which runs down the slates on
Fig. 22.
one side and the slates on the other. If the roof were
nearly flat, like the top of a railway-carriage, the water
Fig. 23.
would still fall off on each side, and there would still
be a line along the middle at which the parting took
place. Some mountains have a ridge almost as sharp
as that of the roof, others are more irregular. Some
WATERPARTING.
"3
undulating ground is as flat as the top of the rail-
way-carriage ; and it is difficult to say by the eye
where the line of waterparting is ; and some ground
is flat here, and round a little farther on, and
broken here, and steep there ; and then it is more
difficult still. But water will always find its level,
and there is always a line at which the water will
know of itself where to go down the one side and
where to go down the other ; and that line, straight
or crooked, is the waterparting. You may trace it
on a good map, even to a small scale and in very flat
countries, by noticing where the rivers start from.
Here is a bit from the centre of Russia where the
undulations of the ground are very slight :
Fig. 24.
The dotted line drawn midway between the various
sources of the streams which flow different ways can-
not be far from the waterparting of this flat district.
198. It is interesting, in going through a moun-
tainous country, to see the parting of the streams.
There is a good example on the Highland Railway
a couple of miles north of Dalnaspidal, where the
GEOGRAPHY.
streams of the Garry and the Truim — one of the
tributaries of the Spey — may be seen to part and fall
off, one down the one slope of the hill, the other
down the other, as the train passes the waterparting.
Sometimes the line will be very crooked, and the
heads of the streams on each side will run back far
past each other, and " overlap," as it is called. In
the highlands of Central Palestine the streams flow
down to the Mediterranean on one side, and the
Jordan valley on the other ; and there the heads of
an eastern torrent will sometimes be 4 miles farther
west than that of the western torrent next to it.
In the central part of North America, at the water-
parting of the Mississippi on the south and the
Saskatchewan on the north, the sources of the rivers
are sometimes so close, and the land between them
so level, that boats can be carried over from one to
the other; and in the rainy season, when the whole
district is inundated, boats can even be rowed across.
199. The waterparting being the ridge or highest
line between two streams, the watershed is the
whole of the ground between the waterparting and the
Fig. 25.
stream. In fact, it is the slope of the roof, The ridge
WA TERSHED. BASIN. r 1 5
(fig. 25) is the waterparting ; the slates on each
Bide are the watershed ; and the gutter (or furrow,
or valley, for the builders call it by all three names)
is the river. " Ridge and furrow " is the common
builders' term for such a roof. The terms are actually
borrowed from the land. Of course so simple a case
as this will seldom or never occur in nature ; the
broad slope of the watershed will in the course of
ages have become indented with smaller streams, each
of which will have its own waterparting and watershed;
but on the whole they will all slope down towards the
main stream — the gutter — at the bottom; and carrying
the principle in your head, you will have no difficulty
in tracing the whole structure.
200. The basin is the whole area or space of ground
which supplies the water to a river, lake, or ocean.
In the first case it comprises not only the valley of
the main river itself, but those of all the rivers and
streams which run into it, with all their tributaries, up
to the waterparting of each. The basin of the Thames
includes the valleys of the Kennet, Wey, Mole,
Darent, Medway, Cherwell, Thame, Colne, Lea, and
other smaller streams, besides its own, and these
cover in all 6,160 square miles. The basin of the
Volga, the largest river of Europe, covers 520,000
square miles ; that of the Rhone 38,000. The flatter
the country the larger the basin.
201. The basin of a lake or ocean includes the
basins of all the rivers which supply it, with all
their tributaries. Take the Dead Sea as an example
of a lake. Its basin includes on the north all the
land drained by the Jordan, with all its streams and
torrents east and west; the streams and torrents
which fall direct into the lake itself, frorp Judaea
n6 GEOGRAPHY.
on the one side and Moab on the other ; and on the
south the great Wady el-Jeib, which drains the whole
northern portion of the Arabah, including the western
flanks of Mount Seir. Thus the basin of this not
very extensive lake stretches from -about 40 miles above
Akabah on the south to beyond Rasheiyah and Mount
Hermon on the north (240 miles), and from Nablus
on the west to Sulkhad on the east (90 miles).
202. The basin of the Mediterranean includes the
basins of all the rivers which drain into it in Europe,
Asia, and Africa ; while the basin of the Atlantic com-
prises the larger part of the continents of North and
South America, the whole of Europe except that which
drains into the Caspian, and a great portion of Africa.
The basin of the Atlantic is calculated to cover on
the whole the enormous area of 19 million square
miles. (§95.)
203. Coast — that is, a rib or side — the edge of
the land near the sea. We say a sandy coast, a rocky
coast, an iron-bound coast. Coasting vessels are
vessels which keep near the land, and a coasting trade
is the traffic carried on in such vessels between two
ports of the same country, as the coal trade between
Newcastle and London. The two sides of India bear
this name ; on the Bombay side the Malabar coast, and
on the Madras side the Coromandel coast. Costa Rica
is the " rich coast." The word was formerly used for
an inland boundary between two countries or districts.
In this sense it is often employed in the topographical
portions of the Bible (Josh. xiii. 16, 25 ; xv. 1, &c).
204. Gulf and bay. — Each a recess in the coast ;
gulf usually perhaps the narrower and deeper, and bay
the broader and more open, of the two, as the Persian
Gulf and the Bay of Biscay. But the Gulf of Lions
COAST. GULF. STRAIT. 117
(which has nothing to do with Lyons, though often
so spelt) and the Gulf of Genoa are wide and open,
while the Bay of Fundy and Chesapeake Bay are long
and comparatively narrow inlets ; and Hudson's Bay
is an inland sea. The Gulf of Mexico is a vast lake
with two narrow openings, through which the Gulf
Stream flows, like the Rhine through the lake of Con-
stance. The Bay of Salamis is practically a lake. In
fact the words are used without any exactness.
Firths, friths, or fiords, are inlets or arms run-
ning up from the sea into the land. In the south of
Scotland and north of Ireland these are sometimes
called lochs or loughs, as at Loch Long, Loch
Fyne; Lough Foyle, Belfast Lough, &c.
A bight (from a sailor's word, meaning the belly
of a hanging rope) is a broad open bay ; as the Bights
of Biafra and Benin, and the Australian Bight — which
are all of this form, and each several hundred miles
long.
205. Strait — that is, the old English for " narrow "
— a sea passage between two continents or islands.
The best known are the Strait of Gibraltar, between
Europe and Africa ; Behring's Strait, between Eastern
Asia and Russian America — the outlet of the Polar
Sea into the Pacific ; Davis's Strait, the entry from
the Atlantic to Baffin's Bay, and the north-west
passage ; Torres Strait, between North Australia and
New Guinea ; the Strait of Magellan, between the
islands of Tierra del Fuego and the mainland of
South America, the most intricate and difficult of all ;
or, to come nearer home, the Menai Strait, between
Carnarvonshire and Anglesey. The term Strait of
Dover has now almost given way to that of The
Channel — la Mancke, or "the sleeve," as the French
18 GEOGRAPHY.
call it. These examples shew that the word is used
both for wide and narrow passages. The Dardanelles
and Bosporus, the inlets to the Sea of Marmora, each
excellent instances of a strait in its strictest sense,
are seldom called by that name.
206. The word *sound is used for the narrow
passage between Zealand and Sweden, and some
other straits in that neighbourhood and the coast of
Norway ; and is frequent amongst the islands on
the west coast of Scotland, which the Norse sailors
greatly frequented in early times, and always for a long
narrow passage. It has even travelled as far as Nan-
tucket and Long island in North America. It is also
applied to Plymouth harbour, which is rather to be
called a bay.
207. Another Norse word is belt, applied to
passages, broader than a sound, between the main-
land and islands of Denmark. Possibly the origin
of the name Baltic Gut is also sometimes used.
" The Gut " is at Gibraltar, and Canso Gut separates
Nova Scotia from Breton. It is probably the same
word with the last syllable of Kattegat, the broad
strait between Denmark and Sweden — a gate or
passage. A name of similar meaning is the fminch,
which is used for the passage between the Hebrides
and Scotland. Kyles is a Celtic word, frequent on
the west and north of Scotland for a long narrow
passage or inlet
208. A road or roadstead is an anchorage, a
part of the sea sufficiently shallow for ships to ride
at anchor. Yarmouth Roads are a good example.
* Saxon, from the same root as "&wim,"— a place which may be swum, or
in which ships can swim.
t Minch ; Gaelic, mionach, entrails. La Manche is perhaps the same word.
ROADS. LAGOONS. ICEBERGS. 119
The Downs, off the coast of Kent, one of the most
important roads in our seas — though not so called —
take their name from the Dunes or sandhills of the
Calais coast opposite, or perhaps of the Goodwin
sands.
209. Lagoons are shallow pieces of water cut off
from the sea or a river by the formation of a bank be-
tween the two, though still connected by one or more
inlets. Such are the lagoons on the islands of which
Venice is built. Such, though not so called, are the
Frische Haff and Kurische Haff, in the Gurf of
Dantzic in the Baltic. The name is also given to the
basins of still water inside the atolls or round coral
islands of the Pacific (§129). A view of them is given
in the Primer of Physical Geography, p. 101.
The shallow basin at the south end of the Dead
Sea is known as the lagoon.
210. Icebergs are masses of fresh -water ice,
broken off from the points of glaciers, and set floating
in the sea. The glaciers of the Arctic regions are
formed in the valleys and creeks of Greenland, and
are of immense width, and often many hundred feet
in thickness. These push slowly down until they
reach the sea, and project into it, sometimes as much
as three miles. By the gradual working of the
waves and the tide up and down, large pieces are
broken off, and being lighter than water, float
away. The icebergs in the Antarctic Ocean are built
up in thin horizontal strata, of about a foot thick
at the top of the berg, compressed to 2 or 3 inches
at the water-line. Whether they are formed by glaciers,
as in the Arctic Seas, is not yet ascertained. There is
always eight times as much, in weight, of the iceberg
below the water as above it, and when we are told
GEOGRAPHY.
of one that floated 200 feet high and 3 miles long,
Fig. 26.
we may judge how enormous the whole mass was,
for there may have been as much as 1,600 feet of
ice under water. Another is said to have been
seen 7 miles long and 4 wide — large enough to have
blotted out London. They are not often so large,
but an average size is a mile long, half a mile wide,
and 200 feet out of the water ; and they come in
such numbers that it was said of one ship that " she
could no more go among them than she could sail
through th: city of London if it were half sunk in the
sea, with all the houses tumbling about and butting
each other." By the Challenger (in S. lat 63°-65°)
they were seen in seventies and eighties at once.
When an iceberg has been so much melted below the
water as to destroy its balance, it will turn over and
settle in a new position.
.211. Icebergs have great quantities ot large rocks
frozen into them, which, as the ice gradually melts,
drop down to the bottom of the sea. They have
ICEBERGS.
been seen to carry blocks estimated at ioo tons
weight. In this way many of the large round rocks,
called boulders, which are found in England and
Scotland, of different stone from any in that neigh-
bourhood, have been dropped when the country was
under water and the climate arctic.
212. In the Northern Hemisphere, the icebergs which
come south, keep near the coasts of Greenland and
Newfoundland, and though they come as far down as
N. lat. 400, yet they are seldom or never seen so far
south in the open sea. The most southerly place in
Europe at which a glacier comes down to the sea is on
the coast of Norway, in N. lat. 670. But in the Southern
Hemisphere, so much greater is the coldness, that on
the southern coast of Chili glaciers come down to the
sea in lat. 460 40', or 200 20' nearer the Equator than
with us, and the icebergs from the mass of land or of
ice round the South Pole, advance across the ocean as
far as 450 and even 400 S. lat., and make navigation
impossible south of that line. At Kerguelen and
Heard islands, south-east of Africa, in the correspond-
ing latitude to Cornwall and Paris, not only do the
glaciers come down to the water, but the islands have
no vegetation higher than the Kerguelen cabbage, no
inhabitants, and no animals but birds and seals.
213. Quite distinct from icebergs is the coast-ice,
or floe-ice. This is frozen salt water, seldom more
than 20 feet thick, and at that thickness would
float at between 2 and 3 feet out of the water. It is
of a dull colour, while the ice of the bergs is a
beautiful blue. True, in the Arctic Expedition of 1875
the " ancient ice " of the Polar Sea was much thicker
than that just named ; but this seems to have arisen
from the heaping up of fragments, when the ice is
GEOGRAPHY.
broken up by the waves and masses are forced one on
to the top of another.
And now I have done ; not because I have said all
there is to say, but because I have come to the end of
my pages. I have tried to tell you three things :
i. How maps are made, and how they are to be
understood.
2. How the land and water are placed on the
world, and how the different countries are like
and unlike each other.
3. How the separate parts or features of the land
and water are made up.
But before we part you must let me give you a
few words of advice. Don't be content with know-
ing your map, or your globe, or your geography
book. The object of them all is to teach you about
the earth, and they are no use if they don't do
that. Get into the habit of looking at the country
itself, of questioning its different parts, the moun-
tains, valleys, rivers, roads, and finding out their con-
nection with one another, and what they all mean
in relation to ourselves. And this you will do by
beginning at home. The most important spot for us
all, in this and many other respects, is our own home.
Not only Europe, not only Great Britain, not only
England, but our part of England. Now I ask you.
When you go out into the garden or street do you
know where the North and South are? Roughly
speaking, the South is where the sun stands at noon.
Look up at that, and then the North is behind you,
the West on your right, and the East on your left.
And now go a step farther. What is there to the
HABIT OF OBSERVING. 123
South or West ? As you stand outside the house and
look South what are you looking towards ? What is the
first place you would come to if you walked or rode that
way ? the first large town ? the first village ? What
rivers, or streams, or railways, would you come to ?
What sort of country is it ? wooded or bare ? grass
or corn ? hilly or flat ? rounded or roughly broken ?
I doubt if you could answer these questions. But
I would have you try, because these things are the
foundation of geography, and the habit of questioning
and finding out is the foundation of all knowledge.
The very wind as it blows in your face prompts
you to question it What frosty regions has the
North-east wind travelled over, to give it its icy keen-
ness? Whence comes the South-west wind with its
moist softness ?
It is that sort of inquiry, begun at your own centre,
and gradually widening to other countries and scenes,
till you know all about them, which is the useful part
of that great science of man and nature, of which
geography is an important portion. Moreover,
geography invites you to this, for it touches on
almost everything high and low. Every rill that
you see running down a lane into the road after the
rain, will tell you something of the nature of the
Ganges, if you look at it properly ; and on the other
hand, there is no subject of inquiry, natural sciences,
commerce, history, religion, which is not more or less
connected with the form and arrangement of earth
and ocean, with mountains, rivers, coasts, or climate,
and which they have not at some time or other mate-
rially influenced. We have noticed a few instances
in the foregoing pages. Keep your eyes open, and
you will see others every day of your life.
APPENDIX.
I. Measures of Length.
i. The knot (geographical or nautical mile, one minute, or one
2i,6oothpart of the earth's circumference at the Equator) con-
tains 2,028 yards, or 6,084 feet.
2. The English or statute mile contains 1, 760 yards, or 5,280 feet.
3. The French kilometre contains 1093 "833 yards, or 328 1 ft. loin.
4. Depths at sea are measured by fathoms, each containing 6 ft
5. Comparative table of knots and statute miles : —
Knots.
Statute Miles.
Statute
Miles.
Knots.
I
I-I52
I
•868
2
2-304
2
1736
3
3"457
3
2-603
4
4-609
4
3-47I
I
576i
5
4 339
6914
6
5-207
I
8 066
7
6075
9-218
8
6*943
9
10-370
9
781 1
10
"•523
10
8-678
20
23045
34-568
20
» 7-357
30
30
26-035
40
46-091
40
34-7I4
5°
57613
5o
43392
60
69-136
60
52-071
70
80-659
7o
60-749
80
92-181
80
69-428
90
103704
90
78-106
IOO
115-227
100
86785
APPENDIX.
125
II.
Table of the Number of Knots contained in a Degree
of Longitude under each Parallel of Latitude.
Parallel
Length of
Parallel
Length
' Parallel
Length
of
Degree
of
i of
Latitude.
in Knots.
Latitude.
Degree.
Latitude.
Degree.
Equator
6o-ooo
i 30°
52-004
6o°
30-074
1°
59 '99 1
! 31
51-475
i 61
29-161
2
59-964
32
50-930
62
28-240
3
59-918
33
50-370
P
27-310
4
59-854
34
49-793
| 64
26*372
5
59-773
35
49-202
65
25*426
6
59-673
36
48-596
66
24471
7
59-556
37
47*975
67
23*509
8
59-419
38
47*339
46-688
| 68
22 -540
9
59-266
39
; 69
2I*564
10
59-094
. 40
46-021
! 70
20-581
11
58-905
4i
45-346
7i
19*592
12
58-697
42
44-654
i 72
I8-596
13
58-472
i 43
43-948
73
I7-595
16-588
H
58-229
I 44
43-229
74
15
57-968
45
42-495
75
I5-577
16
57-690
; 46
41750
76
14-560
17
57-394
47
40-992
11
I3-539
18
57-081
48
40-220
I2-5I4
19
56751
I 49
39-437
79
11-485
20
56-403
! 50
38-642
1 80
IO-452
21
56-038
5'
37834
81
9-416
22
55-657
1 52
37015
82
8*377
23
55-258
i 53
36-185
83
7*366
24
54-842
: 54
35*343
84
6-292
25
54-410
55
34400
85
5-246
26
53-962
56
33627
86
4-199
27
53-496
57
32-754
87
3*i5o
28
53015
52-518
58
31-870
88
2-IOI
29
59
30-977
89
I 050
30
52-004
60
30-074
Pole
o-ooo
126
GEOGRAPHY.
III.
Table of Scales employed in Ordnance Maps (See § 36).
Natural
Inches to One
Scale.
Statute Mile.
Class of Map.
ths
126720
Plans of towns.
Ti*
I20-
Ditto.
TUHH
63-36
Ditto.
TlfW
6o-
Ditto.
TTFT
36
Special maps.
TsYff
26-6
Ditto.
2o00
25*344
Parish plans. Cadastral survey.
Wtts
24-
Special maps.
titst)
12-
Ditto.
TBSTnj
6-
County maps. Reconnaissances.
TT&T7
5-
Indexes.
"ITsTiT
4"
Special maps.
TT$T*
3*
Indexes. Reconnaissances of roads.
1 1 1 1 0
2"
Special maps.
TTTsinF
I'
General map of the United Kingdom.
TTSTTtr
•25
Special maps (4 miles to an inch).
Ditto (5 miles to an inch).
a 1 oHTTir
"2
Imuran
•I
Index map (10 miles to an inch).
TDOttSOTF
•03
Special maps (30 miles to an inch).
In the Ordnance Maps : —
Turnpike or Main Roads, if fenced, are represented by two parallel lines, a
thin and a thick, the thick one being the lower, or right-hand one, ac-
cording to position. Cross Roads are narrower, and have both sides
alike, two thin lines. Footpaths are shown by a single dotted line, and
the sides of all roads, where they are not fenced, by dotted lines.
Rivers by two lines not strictly parallel, the upper one, or the left-hand one
being thick ; and the two open lines joining at last in one black line.
Ferries by a single dotted line. Fords by two dotted lines.
Railroads by thick parallel lines, connected by thin cross lines.
Canals by two lines, a thick and a thin, exactly parallel, the thick line beinf
the upper one, or the left-hand one, according to position. Also by the
locks and bridges.
Bridges. — A moderate-sized bridge is represented by two parallel lines with
their ends bent outwards ; smaller bridges by two small curves drawn
back to back ; the letters S, W, or I are added to show whether the
bridges are of stone, wood, or iron.
Churches are marked with a cross.
Telegraph lines by short, thin, vertical strokes to represent the post*.
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